In 1962, Life International magazine published a logic puzzle that was said to be so difficult that it could only be solved by two percent of the world’s population. It’s been attributed to Einstein, and apparently Lewis Carroll is given a claim to it as well, but regardless of the original author, it’s a great brain workout.

If you haven’t tried a puzzle like this before, don’t get discouraged and go Googling for the answer. You’re given every detail you need to answer the question at the end … Take your time and think about how the components are interrelated. If you’ve solved this puzzle before, this iteration might only be light mental calisthenics, but with its new SoftLayer twist, it should still be fun:

Einstein’s SoftLayer Riddle

The Scenario: You’re in a SoftLayer data center. You walk up to a server rack and you see five servers in the top five slots on the rack. Each of the five servers has a distinct hard drive configuration, processor type, operating system, control panel (or absence thereof) and add-on storage. No two servers in this rack are the same in any of those aspects.

• The CentOS6 operating system is being run on the Xeon 3230 server.
• The Dual Xeon 5410 server is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server running the Red Hat 6 operating system.
• The Dual Xeon 5610 server uses 50GB of CloudLayer Storage as its add-on storage.
• The Quad Xeon 7550 server has no control panel.
• The Cent OS 5 operating system is racked immediately below the server running the Red Hat 5 operating system.
• The server using 80GB NAS add-on storage is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server with two 100GB SSD hard drives.
• The server running the Red Hat 5 operating system uses Parallels Virtuozzo (3VPS) as a control panel.
• The server running the Windows 2008 operating system has two 100GB SSD hard drives.
• The server using Plesk 9 as a control panel is in the middle space in the five-server set in the rack.
• The top server in the rack is the Dual Xeon 5410 server.
• The Xeon 3450 server has two 147GB 10K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives.
• The server using 20GB EVault as its add-on storage has one 250GB SATA II hard drive.
• The server with four 600GB 15K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives is next to (immediately above or below) the server using 100GB iSCSI SAN add-on storage.
• The server using cPanel as a control panel has two 2TB SATA II hard drives.
• The server with four 600GB 15K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server using Plesk 10 (Unlimited) as a control panel.
• One server will use a brand new, soon-to-be-announced product offering as its add-on storage.

Question: What is the monthly cost of the server that will be using our super-secret new product offering for its add-on storage?

Use the SoftLayer Shopping Cart to come up with your answer. You can assume that the server has a base configuration (unless specifically noted in the clues above), that SoftLayer’s promotions are not used, and that the least expensive version of the control panel is being used for any control panel with several price points. You won’t be able to include the cost of the add-on storage (yet), so just provide the base configuration cost of that server in one of our US-based data centers with all of the specs you are given.

Bonus Question: If you ordered all five of those servers, how long would it take for them to be provisioned for you?

Submit your answers via comment, and we’ll publish the comments in about a week so other people have a chance to answer it without the risk of scrolling down and seeing spoilers.

-@khazard

Reading about the server and seeing it at the bottom of the “Quad Processor Multi-core Servers” list on our dedicated servers page is pretty interesting, but the real geeks want to see the nuts and bolts that make up such an amazing machine. I took a stroll down to the inventory room in our DAL05 data center in hopes that they had one of our E7-4850s available for a quick photo shoot to share with customers, and I was in luck.

The only way to truly admire a server is to put it through its paces in production, but getting to see a few pictures of the server might be a distance second.

When you see the 2U face of the server in a rack, it’s a little unassuming. You can load it up with six of our 3TB SATA hard drives for a total of 18TB of storage if you’re looking for a ton of space, and if you’re focused on phenomenal disk IO to go along with your unbelievable compute power, you can opt for SSDs. If you still need more space,can order a 4U version fill ten drive bays!

The real stars of the show when it comes to the E7-4850 server are nestled right underneath these heatsinks. Each of the four processors has TEN cores @ 2.00GHz, so in this single box, you have a total of forty cores! I’m not sure how Moore’s Law is going to keep up if this is the next step to jump from.

With the abundance of CPU power, you’ll probably want an abundance of RAM. Not coincidentally, we can install up to 512GB of RAM in this baby. It’s pretty unbelievable to read the specs available in the decked-out version of this server, and it’s even crazier to think that our servers going to get more and more powerful.

With all of the processing power and RAM in this box, the case fans had to get a bit of an upgrade as well. To keep enough air circulating through the server, these three case fans pull air from the cold aisle in our data center, cool the running components and exhaust the air into the data center’s “hot aisle.”

Because this machine could be used to find the last digit of pi or crunch numbers to find the cure for cancer, it’s important to have redundancy … In the picture above, you see the redundant power supplies that safeguard against a single point of failure when it comes to server power. In each of our data centers, we have N+1 power redundancy, so adding N+1 power redundancy into the server isn’t very redundant at all … It’s almost expected!

If your next project requires a ton of processing power, a lot of room for RAM, and redundant power, this server is up for the challenge! Configure your own quad-proc ten-core beast of a machine in our shopping cart or contact our SLales team for a customized quote on one: sales@softlayer.com

When you get done benchmarking it against your old infrastructure, let us know what you think!

-Summer