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Re: Akamai server reliability

  • From: Vinny Abello
  • Date: Mon Nov 28 14:04:24 2005 
At 01:39 PM 11/28/2005, Roy wrote:
Hi,

Many moons ago, we got a set of Akamai servers. Over the years I think they replaced every one of them at least once. Last August we got a another set of servers due to a move and now two of those three servers have failed.
I still have the original server that started garlic.com in production after 11+ years so I know servers can last a long time. I don't understand why Akamai failure rates are so high

Is anyone else seeing high failure rates of Akamai servers at their facilities?
Out of the total three Akamai servers we have, I think we've had two of them replaced in the past three or four years that we've had them. One was replaced several times. The replacement servers tend to be refurbished and I've seen multiple things wrong with them when they arrive. If I recall correctly, one replacement wouldn't even boot successfully... Just kept crashing. Reloading the OS from an Akamai recovery CD had no affect. Shipping does cause problems whereby the parts can come loose during transit.

The most common problem we see is failed hard drives and/or SCSI bus errors which are likely related to the hard drive failures. I'm surprised Akamai doesn't have any hardware RAID with hot swap yet (at least not in the boxes we have). It would be much less costly for them to ship a new hard drive than a whole new server each time a hard drive fails. I know the idea is to have very cheap boxes in clusters, but I wonder how much they're paying in shipping for replacing the cheap hardware.

As of late, we've had no known problems with our Akamai boxes. That one box does occasionally have weird SCSI hangs where the other two work nonstop. For the most part it is fine though.



Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
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