Over 200,000 Servers in One Place! Visiting Hetzner in Falkenstein (Germany)

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.

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

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'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.

Their buildings are passively cooled so this sounds quite plausible. Pretty fun video showing the realities of their setup ▶ 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.

There's some videos out there showing off their custom motherboards, it's an odd mixture of standard-ish consumer ATX but stripped down to the absolute bare essentials and with some components rearranged for better airflow in racks chassis they also build themselves: link Another video showing the custom racks and other infrastructure: ▶ this video

▶ this video Datacenters in my country usually had some rooms with tower servers 20 years ago here, well my first colo was for the tower server I brought in the large backpack:-). But density requirements, cold/hot aisles etc. prevailed and towers are generally considered inefficient for the datacenter purposes. And then you have Hetzner datacenter that probably all people running DCs I know would ridicule, but they would not be able to respond to fan replacement at the same time. I wonder how many rack server chassis are recycled each year because the manufacturer just won't let you reuse them with new motherboard, power supply due to new shape, design, ports placement etc.

They have ATX cases on shelves. You can take a look at this tour of their datacenter [1] for more insight. ATX cases are visible around the 3 minute mark. -- [1] ▶ this video

For those curious about what it actually looks like in a Hetzner datacenter, der8auer made a video about their Falkenstein, Germany location: ▶ this video

I'm quite jealous of their closet then :) For anyone curious here's a tour of one of their data centers ▶ this video .

I know this is a joke but if you'd like to see inside their data center, there's a nice video: ▶ this video