Over the past few months, Axiom has been migrating its physical infrastructure to a new data center in Portland, Oregon. Previously at Atmosera Data Center 3, all of our hardware has now been moved to a larger space in the Pittock Block, a historic Portland building that also contains the Portland Internet Exchange. The move gives us access to more racks (i.e., more hardware expansion room) and faster connections for our High Performance Compute systems.
As we were moving all the hardware anyway, we took the opportunity to upgrade or replace many of our existing blades. This included manually swapping out or installing new CPUs, heat sinks, RAM cards, daughter boards, and infiniband cards; installing the upgraded blades and connecting them to the network to test them, and replacing any defective hardware (when you’re going through a thousand RAM cards, you get to find a few bad ones). As new hardware came online in the Pittock, our software engineers moved over our databases and services, changed IPs to the new locations, and tested them to make sure they all still worked together.
