Comment by pixelesque
5 hours ago
The date and time durations given seem a bit confusing to me...
"we kicked off a Railway Metal project last year. Nine months later we were live with the first site in California".
seems inconsistent with:
"From kicking off the Railway Metal project in October last-year, it took us five long months to get the first servers plugged in"
The article was posted today (Jan 2025), was it maybe originally written last year and the project has been going on for more than a year, and they mean that the Railway Metal project actually started in 2023?
ah that's my bad - I wrote this in Dec, we only published in Jan. Obv. missed updating that.
Timeline wise; - we decided to go for it and spend the $$$ in Oct '23 - Convos/planning started ~ Jan '24 - Picked the vendors we wanted by ~ Feb/Mar '24 - Lead-times, etc... meant everything was ready for us to go fit the first gear by mostly ourselves at the start of May (that's the 5mo) - We did the "proper" re-install around June, followed closely by the second site in ~ Sep, around when we started letting our users on it as a open beta - Sep-Dec we just doubled down on refining software/automation and process while building out successive installs
Lead times can be mind numbing. We have certain switches from Arista that have a 3-6 mo leadtime. Servers are build to order, so again 2+ months depending on stock. And obv. holidays mean a lot of stuff shuts down around December.
Sometimes you can swap stuff around to get better lead-times, but then the operational complexity explodes because you have this slightly different component at this one site.
I used to be a EEE, and I thought supply chain there was bad. But with DCs I think it's sometimes worse because you don't directly control some parts of your BoM/supply chain (especially with build-to-order servers).