Central Grows Up - See The History

A few months ago we announced that the US Maven Central server had been moved over 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 datacenter to our headquarters in Silver Spring, MD.

When I was unboxing 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: 60gb (this is the earliest confirmed size I can track down)
• Repository size as of today: 286gb
• Projected size next month with the addition of Java.net: 350gb
• This machine never had a hardware failure. In fact, even the original drives and RAM are still functioning perfectly.
• It was only rebooted / powercycled 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 2 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."