From the archive · 31 December 2007
From the archive: our first racks
The first 19" rack, two servers we built ourselves and a story of gratitude: this is how it all began, from home, in 1998.
A few photos of our first 19" rack, kindly provided by RETEX S.A. http://www.retex.es.
We are adding 2 servers based on the Pentium IV 2Ghz with 2GB of Rambus @800Mhz and 3Com Fast-Ethernet Server NICs, powered by an APC Smart-UPS uninterruptible power supply with its own distribution strips with circuit-breaker protection.
That rack has a story of its own: the team at RETEX S.A. gave it to us when elstir was little more than an idea running from home. There was little money and plenty of ambition, and they believed in the project. The two Pentium IVs you see in the photos we assembled ourselves, piece by piece — there was no budget for anything more, and it turned out to be the best possible school.
Today, in 2026
Those two hand-assembled Pentium IVs are today Dell PowerEdge servers with AMD EPYC and NVMe storage in an ENS High data centre — the top level of Spain's national security framework. The school is still the same: knowing the iron down to the last screw.
elstir data centre →