reported that vise, Redditor PoisonWaffle3 shared a new post detailing how he got his hands on one of Netflix’s decade-old cache servers. For freeIt’s 10 years old but still has serious hardware by today’s standards, with a staggering 262TB of storage. This post is one of the few examples of an up close and personal look at Netflix’s server infrastructure.
The Redditor says he received the Netflix servers courtesy of the internet service provider he works for. Apparently, the ISP has been using these his Netflix servers for years, but is now upgrading their infrastructure to new hardware. This allowed PoisonWaffle3 to get this server for free.
According to Vice, the servers were known as Netflix caching servers and were part of Netflix’s Open Connect Content Delivery Network (CDN). This system is still in use today and was designed to reduce the overall bandwidth demand of the Netflix platform by giving ISPs their own Netflix caching servers. This allows him to play popular Netflix content directly from his ISP’s servers, instead of moving from Netflix’s server farm.
The server is painted bright red and comes in a 4U rackmount server chassis form factor. It has an LCD on the front for monitoring server status, a pair of VGA ports and a pair of USB ports. On the left is a pair of low-profile power supplies that appear to be hot-swappable.
Specs feature a Supermicro motherboard with a single Intel 10-core hyper-threaded Xeon E5 2650L v2 chip, 64 GB of DDR3 memory, and a 10 GbE card. For storage, the system uses six he 500GB Micron SSDs and thirty-six 7.2TB 7200RPM drives. I don’t know what protocol the drives are running, but I can assume they are all SAS drives (including SSDs).
Even by today’s standards, these core specs aren’t bad, and were incredibly good when this server was first deployed in the early 2010s. 64 GB of memory and 262 TB of storage are nothing to sneeze at, especially if you use it at home as a network attached storage (NAS).
Rugged specs aside, the units are decidedly very simple software-wise.According to Vice, Netflix’s former VP of NSI, Dave Temkin, said that these Netflix servers are just Intel FreeBSD boxes, partly It says it runs on Linux. This makes sense given that the servers are only designed to cache video files from Netflix servers.
According to the Redditor, his Netflix caching server needed some repairs, including replacing some noisy fans and one failed drive, but that’s about it. He states that the server will get a second life operating as his NAS in his home.
