A few months ago, we announced that the US Maven Central server was moved to a virtual system.
In the natural course of machine rotations, I had some out of warranty machines de-racked, packaged up and sent from the Contegix data center to our headquarters in Silver Spring, MD.
When I unboxed them, it dawned on me for the first time that I was laying eyes on a machine so many people have relied upon for years, and yet had been so far unseen.
Well, here it is:
A few facts about Central during the time it was hosted on the machine, you see here (3/2007 - 3/2011):
Original configuration:
Dell PowerEdge 2950
2 x E5310 Xeon 1.6ghz processors
4gb 533Mhz RAM
3 x 73gb SAS 15k Hard drives
Artifacts requested over 12 billion times by 14.3 million unique IP addresses
Repository size as of Jan, 2009: 60 GB (this is the earliest confirmed size I can track down)
Repository size as of today: 286 GB
Projected size next month with the addition of Java.net: 350 GB
This machine never had a hardware failure. In fact, even the original drives and RAM are still functioning perfectly.
It was only rebooted / power-cycled twice, once to add more RAM and once to add some bigger disks
It boggles my mind to think about how many applications both commercial and open source contain bits fetched from this singular machine. Now that we have two machines in the UK and 2 VMs floating across 6 hosts in the US, there can never be a single machine in the future we can gaze upon and say "that was Central."
