Not a Mac (Patreon)

So here's a weird thing. A heavy, beat-up box, wrapped in tape got dropped-off at a local workplace with no shipping information at all. It sat there as an eyesore for a couple months with no one claiming it, and it was decided to get rid of it. It appeared it might be computer equipment, so I got curious and took it off their hands.

A shipping-damaged 2U server.

Specifically a Riverbed Steelhead CX7080 "Application Accelerator"

I don't really have any idea what this exactly does. It is heavy.

I try to power-on and it powers on! The redundant power supplies are no longer "hot-swappable" (from being run-over, or whatever happened), but I can't help thinking that such elements of this server are in common the Apple Network Server from 25 years ago. Above the PSU's are two additional storage bays like the ANS 700 had.

Both 770W power supplies work!

There are 6 PCI slots. How do you get 6 slots? Two 3-slot riser cards. Much like the one in the Power Macintosh 4400 !!

PCI Slots that the riser cards were plugged into

I removed the riser cards. One of the network cards was flopping around a bit too much on the riser card and I noticed the card slot had been split from the impact.

Riser cards. Note the damaged PCI slot

PCI network card from the broken slot

Nothing in tech specs mentions what processors these use, but there are two prominent heat sinks in the middle of the board that look like they are nickel-plated copper. In other words, not cheap-looking. In fact the build quality of this thing is very high.

Tucked around the heat sinks are the RAM slots. 12 slots each with 16GB RAM cards = 192GB !! I was happy when I had 192MB RAM with my G4 tower.

This RAM card has more memory than my 'daily-driver' MAC Pro !

Another common feature of Servers is the hot-swappable fan. This one has 8 of them with output directed over the heat sinks.

Downtown Las Vegas!

Note the little seven-segment LED display on the board, showing codes to indicate status. This is similar to the display on the ANS.

The storage is in the front. 12 storage bays.

The server contained 2x 1TB HDD and 8x 960GB Intel SSD's. One of each type of drive was damaged by the impact. 

The drives are mounted on sleds which mate with an interconnect board when inserted. The ANS was still much cooler in this regard. Unfortunately, a few connectors were broken off upon impact. Also, some sleds can't be removed, and others won't slide back in. 

Coolest computer invention ever ... backlit power button !!

With the VGA port, I was able to connect to my trusty LCD panel that I got for $5 from Value Village...

... What he said ...

So, we have this top tier server, additionally maxed out with RAM, drives and network cards ... damaged and dumped.

What do you think happened here?

And now, what do I do with this thing?