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Comment by rodgerd | Hacker News Reader

I worked with a Brit whose company had taken an outage when theives back a truck up do a datacentre and made off with several fully-loaded E10ks.

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Any idea what the plan for the E10ks was?

Data center where techs don't ask questions?

Fraud by someone who did the TCO math on a Linux PC farm?

Does an E10k have unusually high gold content, by pound of gear?

(Scott McNealy thinking outside the box to boost sales numbers?)

Huh? Why would a datacenter ask questions? I've worked in dozens of datacenter and nobody ever asked "hey! Where did you get that?"

The E10k was a $1m server. Steal 3 racks of those, sell them to a var for $500k, party.

One would think it would lead to some awkward questions down the road, when a serial number was read off to support.

They could of already had a buyer setup also that was looking for server equipment for doing nefarious or non nefarious things.

> They could of already had a buyer setup also that was looking for server equipment for doing nefarious or non nefarious things.

Nefarious? Like running Oracle?

> Any idea what the plan for the E10ks was?

My colleague's theory was they were likely going to the oil and gas exploration modelling or nuclear research for middle-eastern states that couldn't get state-of-the-art gear.

I remember something similar happening at "AboveSecure", Abovenet's silly "super secure" vaulted datacenter in that downtown San Jose building that used to be the massive sports bar. The thing there was storage though, like 2 or 3 racks of EMC jbods. A datacenter tech thought they were legit and helped them get the kit on the truck.

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