We needed more memory. The Shutterstock WebOps team finished counting the RAM for a set of Dell R510 search and database servers in two locations.
The list called for 472 eight-gigabyte RAM modules in total. Sixty-four were for Solr search servers. The remaining 408 were for database servers. The exact internal site names and ticket number are not important outside the company, but the quantities show the size of what would otherwise sound like a routine hardware upgrade.
My reply was one line: “Bitchin thanks man!”
That was normal email for me in 2013. Someone on the team did the detailed work, put the quantities in a clear list, and I confirmed that we could move ahead. There was no need to rewrite the calculation in management language.
The search and database systems had different jobs, but both benefited from more memory. Solr kept indexes used to find images. Database servers supported the application data behind the marketplace. More RAM could keep frequently used data available without waiting for slower storage, although the email does not state the benchmark, utilization level, or performance target behind this particular purchase.
Shutterstock had ended 2012 with more than 23 million images in the collection. Each new image added metadata, search-index work, contributor records, and customer activity. The company had delivered 76 million paid downloads during 2012. Hardware planning had to account for both the growing catalog and the increasing number of people using it.
This source does not establish the purchase price, installation date, or measured result after the upgrade. It documents the planning step before procurement: identify the affected machines, count the modules by server group, and attach the detail to an operations ticket.
It also shows that infrastructure capacity was still physical. Cloud services were part of the environment, but large search and database workloads continued to depend on racks of dedicated servers. Increasing capacity sometimes meant software changes. On this Friday, it meant buying and installing hundreds of memory modules without losing track of which systems they were for.