According to Vice, Reddit user PoisonWaffle3 recently posted that he had managed to get hold of a 10-year-old Netflix cache server that, despite being made a decade ago, had specs that were out of date even by today’s standards. Not cheap either, and has a whopping 262TB of storage.
The netizen works for an ISP company, and the Netflix cache server was eliminated by his company.
According to Vice, the Netflix cache server is used on Netflix’s open-connect content delivery network (CDN). This system, still in use today, was designed to reduce the overall bandwidth requirements of the Netflix platform by providing ISPs with their own Netflix cache servers. This allows users scattered around to watch Netflix content directly from the ISP’s server instead of streaming it from Netflix’s main server group.
The server is painted bright red and comes in the form of a 4U rackmount server chassis. On the front there’s an LCD screen for monitoring server health, as well as a pair of VGA ports and a pair of USB ports. On the left is a pair of power supplies that may support hot-swapping.
In terms of specifications, the server uses an AMD motherboard with an Intel 10-core Hyperthreaded Xeon E5 2650L v2 chip, 64GB of DDR3 memory, and a 10GbE network card. In terms of storage, the system uses six 500GB Micron SSDs and thirty-six 7.2TB 7200RPM HDDs for a total of 262TB.
According to former Netflix executive Dave Temkin, this series of servers originally mainly executed the FreeBSD system and partially executed the Linux system.
After testing and maintaining it (replacing a noisy fan and a dead hard drive), this netizen turned it into a very large NAS running TrueNAS.