Five weeks, five shows, four states and a few thousand frequent flyer miles have come and gone since Sherry posted the trade show teaser, and we made it back to the office safely … for the most part. Our only major casualty: The Dell PowerEdge 1950 server chassis we used for the Server Challenge will never serve again.

After being disassembled and speed-assembled by more than 300 people over 800 times at ad:tech, Interop and Web 2.0 Expo SF, the hardware was worn and torn quite a bit. With a few replacement pieces, some elbow grease and a little bit of luck, the box “survived” the torture — meaning that it still generally looked like a server when we were done with it. When it comes to whether or not the survival extended beyond the server’s appearance to its functionality, you can judge for yourself:

In all honesty, the server wasn’t doing much serving before we stole it from the warehouse – a point made clear by the absence of processors. The chassis was set to be recycled, so before it passed on into the great data center in the sky, we gave it one last hurrah as the featured server in the Server Challenge. For a device that typically lives behind locked doors and thick walls, this was quite a way to say goodbye.

Its fate is a cautionary tale to those of you looking to train for your next chance to compete in The Planet Server Challenge. If your server works and you want it to keep working, don’t try this at home.

While the idea to offer conference attendees the ability to reassemble a few parts of a dead server didn’t seem like a groundbreaking idea, the results suggest otherwise. At all of the Server Challenge’s appearances, we heard praises for the activity and gratitude for the opportunity to engage. Even if attendees lose the collateral they received at our booth, they’ll have their YouTube videos and pictures from our booth that remind them that when they think about servers, they should think about The Planet.

In addition to the excitement of the competition, having the server in our booth also started some great conversations. One of my favorite questions from the show floors was whether we did this very often in day-to-day operations. The answer is a resounding “No.” As you can see by the video above, when you start factoring people into the equation, you run the risk of breaking things.

When it comes time to provision a new server for a customer, we have an automated provisioning (AP) system that will select the available server in our fleet that meets or exceeds the orders specs so the order can be processed as quickly as possible. In general, our DC technicians never have to touch a new customer’s server, and when they do, it’s usually just a matter of adding a hard drive or a stick of RAM. The AP system does the heavy lifting so a new order can brought online quicker and will be less likely to suffer a build-related failure.

As you’ve heard from Duke and Stephen recently, we have a few projects in the pipeline to continue our push toward automation. We’ll do our best to update you with all the good news as it becomes available, so stay tuned.

-Kevin

P.S. The Server Challenge winners at ad:tech and Interop graciously let us record videos with them, and we’ve uploaded them to our YouTube channel. Check out Katie’s presentation of the ASUS Eee PC to ad:tech winner Robert Murkofsky and Nick Foster’s incredible winning build at Interop.