Anand's Server upgrade article is up!!

[A2KLAU]

Thats a power house and a half them servers if they ran RC5 wow... Anyway... They are pretty cool machines Man and to think it all started out as a small website, personal one, and now this...

Its anyone's dream this And especially mine

Albert.

 

[mikefromwa]

all that fancy (love 10k scsi raid arrays!) hardware tied together with one 24port smc switch...hrm.

anyone else see a major bottleneck and point of failure, or am i just missing something?

 

[johnny1111]

I gotta' say that was a good article. -john

 

[Adul]

<< all that fancy (love 10k scsi raid arrays!) hardware tied together with one 24port smc switch...hrm.

anyone else see a major bottleneck and point of failure, or am i just missing something? >>



Switches have dedicated bandwidth per port. Has for redundancy, well if this guy dies, I am sure it can be quickly replaced in the unfortunate even of failure. Then again the servers can resort to the other switch used on the public side for us. While this would kill bandwidth, the site would still be running.

 

[SUOrangeman]

I saw the &quot;AMD 760MP Review&quot; hint as well. But, I figured that it was the article they had done a while back. After reading Sochan's post though, I'm wondering if there actually was an article on that topic a while back.

Details, man! Details!

-SUO

 

[NFS4]

<< damn, i wanna work for anand there... hehe... thunderbirds, dual xeons... GB's of memory.. drool.... >>


I was there at the lab when he performed the last upgrade last year. The were dual Xeon's (with massive heatsink/fans) in cases on the floor along with tons of memory.

I nearly had a fit when I saw the glorious image

 

[mikefromwa]

<<

Switches have dedicated bandwidth per port. Has for redundancy, well if this guy dies, I am sure it can be quickly replaced in the unfortunate even of failure. Then again the servers can resort to the other switch used on the public side for us. While this would kill bandwidth, the site would still be running. >>



what i meant by bottleneck was, the single uplink port (200mbps full duplex) the the entire rack is piped thru

I know that 8-9MB/sec upload (common max single direction throughput, ~12.5MB/sec being peak maximum) is alot for a webpage...but theres alot of traffic to anandtech.com and forums.anandtech.com (especially when anand has some of his super neat articles that every techie in the world reads).

Just making an observation, redundant switches would be the first thing on my list of upgrades...along with a gigabit uplink module for those times when you feel the need to burst.

 

[Anand Lal Shimpi]

Thanks for the great response guys, I really love writing these articles as well. As far as the 24-port switch is concerned, we are currently bursting at about 22Mbps so we're not switch limited yet (thankfully, bandwidth is really expensive). Redundancy on the switch side is something we have thought about, although it is rare that switches go bad that soon. I'll see what I can do about getting another switch up there.

Buddha Bart

hahaha, I'll have to remember that. Hmmm...I guess the &quot;Click to Enlarge&quot; feature is really useful then isn't it?

PG

Working late hours is part of the fun I've said it before, there's no greater feeling of accomplishment than clicking submit on our doc engine and going to bed after a 12 hour writing spree.

Take care,
Anand

 

[vec]

I really enjoy reading those server upgrade articles. I've enjoyed each one eventhough I don't deal w/ servers at all.

Just reading about how people troubleshoot and determine what hardware/software to use is pretty interesting.

 

[Que-TiP]

great article...but is anyone else kind of surprised how much ide is being used??? long live scsi! hehe

-Alex

 

[UnixFreak]

I know I was drooling when I saw those racks... pretty sweet.. and kudos to the linux use for the load balancing, that's pretty sweet, I agree about the switch though, even if the bandwidth may not be needed, it still doesnt hurt to have a backup.

 

[Whitewolf]

Anand, can I borrow them. I'll be nice.......

 

[w74656]

Just think how much money went into those...

 

[SendTrash]

nice article!

 

[MichaelD]

I really like how Anandtech lists every little component for every server. I'm a details person. I love schematics/parts lists....etc...OK, I&quot;m weird, so what?

I also really like the &quot;in progress pics&quot; with all the parts strewn everwhere. The server room pics were awesome...wow...talk about power. Keep up the great work!

 

[Adul]

A lot of us like the little details listed. I am now interested to see how the DDR server hold up. Maybe some info on how their load handling is.

 

[sandorski]

Listen up peeps: Anand and those working for him are very tortured souls. Imagine being surrounded by such hardware ownage day-in day-out, never once getting the chance to play CS, Infiltration, DoD, Tribes2, or someother awesome online game(heck, I'd play 'em all simultaneously with that hardware). If they slacked off and did play games, we'd be po'ed and they'd get buried in angry e-mails.

Anand makes the ultimate sacrifice daily. Someone call the Pope! I think we may have a future Saint in our midst!

 

[NaughtyusMaximus]

So when will we get to read page five of this 760MP review?