ISP worker gets powerful 262TB Netflix caching server for free

According to a report by Deputy, Redditor PoisonWaffle3 shared a new post detailing how he was able to hack one of Netflix’s 10-year-old caching servers for free. Despite being a decade old, it packs some serious hardware even by today’s standards and packs an impressive 262TB of storage. This post represents one of the very few times we’ve seen Netflix’s server infrastructure up close and personal.

The Redditor says he got the Netflix server courtesy of the company he works for, an internet service provider. Apparently, the ISP has been using these Netflix servers for years, but is now upgrading its infrastructure with newer hardware, which is how PoisonWaffle3 was able to get this server for free.

According to Vice, this server is known as the Netflix Caching Server and is part of Netflix’s Open Content Delivery Network (CDN). This system is still in use today and is designed to reduce the overall bandwidth requirements of the Netflix platform by providing ISPs with their own Netflix caching server. This allows popular Netflix content to be played directly from the ISP’s servers instead of traveling from Netflix’s server farms.

The server is painted in bright red and comes in a 4U rack-mounted server chassis form factor. An LCD for monitoring server health is on the front, along with a pair of VGA ports and a pair of USB ports. On the left are a pair of thin power supplies that are probably hot-swappable.

Specs include a Supermicro motherboard that includes a single 10-core Xeon E5 2650L v2 chip with Intel hyperthreading, 64GB of DDR3 memory, and a 10GbE card. For storage, the system uses six 500GB Micron SSDs and 36 7.2TB 7200RPM drives. We don’t know what protocol the drives are running on, but we can assume they are all SAS drives (including SSDs).

Even by today’s standards, these basic specs aren’t bad, and were incredibly good back in early 2010 when this server was first deployed. 64GB of memory and 262TB of storage is nothing to sneeze at, especially for home use as a network attached storage (NAS).

Strong specs aside, the device is apparently pretty simple on the software side of things. According to Vice, Dave Temkin, former VP of NSI at Netflix, says that these Netflix servers are just Intel FreeBSD boxes, while some run Linux. This makes sense considering that the servers are only meant to cache video files coming from Netflix servers and nothing more.

According to the Redditor, his Netflix caching server did need some repairs, including replacing a few noisy fans and one failed drive, but that’s about it. He says the server will get a second life running as a NAS at home.