I also notice that you don't appear to have any physical isolation between the hot and cold aisles, is that just for the photos?
Interestingly I've found the color handling to be "odd". I'd recommend looking at nuke from the foundry.
It's designed to be fast, scriptable, and handle comically large images. One of the nice things is its multi-platform. you'll not need the GUI, but you'll love the color tools.
It would cost much much less and you would be able to have completely uniform server hardware with faster networking.
It's the one major component that I decided to wait on deploying, since there isn't an urgent need to contain a space that is (at first) mostly empty. We're aiming to have it fully contained by the time 1/4 of the cabinet positions are occupied.
"OS X
Apple‘s operating system offers numerous advantages over other platforms when it comes to image processing, and it is also favored by many designers for the same reasons. imgix has written tools which allow us to leverage these strengths with our service, using OS X for image operations where it provides superior quality and performance.
Deploying this type of hardware in a datacenter environment is a bit of a challenge, and one that we worked on extensively with our systems integrator. Our custom cabinet design allows us to operate these servers the same as any other in our production environment, and ensures they are a reliable component of the imgix infrastructure."
I did enough work professionally with image/video/CV processing that I have a rough idea, but I'd still like to hear some non-marketing speak about why the company decided to invest in the huge hassle that is having rack-mounted Apple gear which misses all redundancy, connectivity and management equipment of standard rackmount servers.
Although I have no idea what those advantages could be.... AppleScript+Photoshop? Who knows... On any platform you have essentially the same choice in performance and flexibility of imaging libraries, so it's anyone's guess for now what they think they need them for.
It's especially funny because of just how much they talk up fibre connectivity, and how the copper is just used as a fallback management fabric.... but these Mac Minis are obviously connected with copper.
The excess unlit fiber capacity lets us install more switches or bring up more uplink ports for a particular rack, as necessary.
One thing that we had to cut for length is how our cabinets are built: we work closely with our systems integrator on a few rack designs that we re-use often, and they build, test and cable (with cat6) every server in the rack according to that design. Once a rack rolls onto the datacenter floor, we bolt it down, connect ground and power leads, and run short patch cables from the switch uplinks to the patch panels suspended from the ladder rack above each cabinet position.
Looks like they use them for OS X.
Also, I have to say I really like the API(?) for manipulating images via url parameters, and even more, I really like that you used it on this blog post. When I went to pull the images from your site, I was able to get the full resolution versions of those images just by making some minor edits to the urls. This made making an album really easy[1].
[0] - http://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn
[1] - http://imgur.com/a/OFVqX
The ascii art logo in your web site's source code is amusing!
I had no idea what the "Enjoyed" button at the bottom of the page was for. When I clicked it, the counter incremented. Is this some new stand alone like button that people are doing?
imgix website: http://www.imgix.com/
All of the core infrastructure is shared between OS X and Linux systems -- same DNS caches, NTP servers, etc. -- so there's no additional work there.
There are some things that are a little tougher to do on OS X. The userland utilities are different (and anything GPL is trapped on GPLv2 versions for all eternity, such as bash and rsync), and sometimes we have to work around that or build local packages.
Ansible doesn't really know about things like launchd processes or cron jobs, and OS X has nothing analogous to useradd, so we had to write some modules and implement branching in common playbooks to handle tasks in different ways on Linux and OS X.
Ultimately they run Unix, and once our environment is deployed onto a server you don't really notice the operational differences on a day to day basis.
what? like only support opengl 3.0?
the shots are excellently done.
The photography was all done by imgix's lead designer Miguel Cardona, and I helped out a bit by finding things for him to shoot. I think he did a great job -- it can be a real challenge to get visually interesting shots in a datacenter environment.
imgix's founder and CEO (zacman85) replied in another comment with a few more details about why we use OS X for some things, but there's a lot more detail we could go into. We're thinking about exploring these kind of topics in more depth in future articles, and I hope you'll check them out.
That said, I'd love to see a Blade Hackintosh (has it been done?)
If you purchase a legitimate license to OS X and only use it on personally owned hardware that you keep in your possession (unlike that company that tried to sell Hackintoshes a couple years ago), it's very unlikely that Apple could ever have a legal case against you.
I think with OSX they used the right tool for the right job, because, as always, there is never a perfect solution to any problem on the trilateral axis (good/fast/cheap).