We recently installed 100 custom built Hudson test servers at our colo facility. They are maxed out on the RAM, have the fastest quad core available, and the second generation Intel SSD hard drives that Linus Torvalds recommended us. We had calculated the cost of doing it on the cloud, but it was a lot more economical for us to run it at our own colo facility because these test servers require so much horse power and run continuously on every SVN commit.
So why did we need so many test servers? Our EE builds are each certified with rougly 10,000 tests per version. Each test must be run on all of our different supported combinations (i.e. application servers, databases, and operating systems). The time required to run these tests vary roughly from seconds to hours depending on the test itself and the environment we run the test on (ie. deploying a portlet to WebLogic and WebSphere takes a lot longer than deloying to Tomcat).
These servers are another milestone in helping us reach the quality that our enterprise clients depend on.
Here's the front view of our cage. It's quite massive. It stacks up to way over 7 feet.
We aren't just fanatics about our code quality, we're also fanatics about how we tie the cables for our test servers.
That's Jeff testing the network.
And that's Louis goofing off by cutting the cable that Jeff was testing. All in good fun.
Just playing with ya Louis. Our IT and QA staff worked countless hours planning and building this to ensure that we can ship out the best product possible. We hope that you guys get to enjoy our labor of love.
