About 10 years ago, we received a donation of an Enterprise 450 server from Sun Microsystems. This was a fairly heavy duty server for the late '90s, sporting a half gig of RAM and a whopping 36GB of disk space (which we divided in half for RAID, giving us 18GB). We named it Bertha.
Bertha hosted the first CSDL website, our tech report library, and many of our early CSDL applications. Over 10 years of continuous operation (which in human years would make Bertha the equivalent of about 580 years old), Bertha had only one hardware/software malfunction that I can remember: about five years ago, it started to overheat because too much dust buildup in its internal fan filter. After I vacuumed the filter, Bertha returned to flawless performance.
Last year, we bought a new server: a dual processor XServe, with 8GB of RAM and three 256GB disks. We named it Dasha. We've spent the past year slowly migrating our data off of Bertha, building a new CSDL website, and generally developing trust and confidence in Dasha. All this time, Bertha was humming along in the background as a safety net in case Dasha proved an unworthy successor to Bertha.
Robert recently emailed me about the electrical usage of our servers, and I realized that there was no longer any reason to keep Bertha going. So today, I shut her down and powered her off.
If you are a CSDL member past or present who relied on Bertha, I invite you to raise a glass in her honor today. She was a steadfast member of the research group who complained less than any of us and worked harder than most of us!
