der8auer EN
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2021–2025
20:29 · 1.6M views · Oct 13, 2021
Overclocker der8auer tours Hetzner's Falkenstein data center in Germany, showing custom racks, own mainboards, passively cooled servers and ATX-style cases on shelves.
HN points to it whenever Hetzner comes up, as the best look inside their unusual, semi-custom and low-cost data center setup.
17 comments from Hacker News
Couldn't agree more, I think Hetzner is probably Europe's best bet on a hyperscaler. One of the more telling indicators IMO is their growing market share outside of the EU/DACH. To add on to the comments about Hetzner building their own custom hardware, they also custom built their own software stack. They rejected the hype that was OpenStack and worked diligently on their own hypervisor platform (that they are incredibly secretive about) and that appears to be paying off in spades for them. Most sovereign cloud plays end up being suffocated by the complexity, and incoherence, of the OpenStack ecosystem. It just becomes impossible to ship. I know Hetzner is working like crazy on a managed Kubernetes offering atm, I think when that lands it could be very interesting. For a fascinatingly different take on how to build a datacenter: this video
There has been a nice YT video recently showing how Hetzner operates their DC and their servers: this video Was quite surprised that they use custom built server racks with their own custom-made mainboards delivered by OEMs. They even have their own long-term Fan testing rigs and custom HDD failure check setups.
The best resource I know is a tour of one of their data centers. Around minute 6 you get some nice views on their current-gen racks, and later in the video you see the back side, followed by the assembly of the servers. this video
There's a great YouTube tour of one of their data centres here: this video 'Over 200,000 Servers in One Place! Visiting Hetzner in Falkenstein (Germany)' The channel is well worth a subscribe too.
Der8auer did some similar videos a few years ago, but in English: this video [LINK] The second is especially interesting as it demonstrates Hetzner's unique semi-custom hardware.