A Closer Look At The TTZ Server
written by John Chow
For those who asked, here’s an inside look at the servers that powers The TechZone and the TTZ Media Network. All TTZ servers are made by Dell. Why? Because Dell is the industry standard when it comes to servers.
This is the inside of the Dell PowerEdge 1850 server. Our servers features dual 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs, two 15K RPM SCSI 320 drives and 4GB of OCZ DDR2 ECC RAM.
This is a close-up of the cooling system. Those fans are very loud! But then, loudness doesn’t really matter for a server since it’ll be installed in a data center where noise level is not one of the things they measure for.
One of the two 73GB 15,000RPM SCSI 320 hard drives. The drives are set up in RAID 1 and are hot swappable. For those who don’t know RAID 1 is a mirror setup. Drive 1 is an exact mirror of drive 2. Whatever is written to one drive also write onto the other drive. The server can get its information from either drive in case one goes down or dies.
Not one, but two power supplies, just in case one dies. The power supplies are also hot swappable, meaning you do not need to turn the server off in order to unplug it.
Four 1GB sticks of OCZ DDR2 ECC RAM ensure the db server never runs low on memory. DDR2 ECC RAM is extremely expensive. Luckily OCZ Technology is one of my sponsors and supplied the RAM for free.
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Geek pr0n, very nice. I have two 1850s running my sites myself, I don’t colo them, though - but host them at JupiterHosting.com in Cali.
[...] A Closer Look At The TTZ Server - This is an inside look at the servers that powers The TechZone and the TTZ Media Network. Dell makes all TTZ servers because Dell is the industry standard when it comes to servers. [...]
John, my initial reply was regected… script asked what year it was & returned that 2007 was incorrect…
Anyhow, wanted to say that you setup a nice system. Also wanted to tell about my setup - It’s a beast… two opteron 246 processors, supermicro motherboard (dual-core ready for when I need to upgrade), 8GB RAM, 8x 15K RPM SCSI HDDs (RAID1 for OS, 4 disk RAID10 for database & other files and two hot spares). Also got one of those snapgear ethernet cards with the integrated firewall (the version with SSH support)… not sure if I’ll be using that when the server goes into the datacenter in February. I’m a bit of a hardware geek if you couldn’t tell…
Nice article, but if Dell is really the industry standard for servers… I swear with the HP proliant servers.
would be nice to see some graphs.
The servers can handle the load that your sites are giving
Expensive setup, with the SCSI drives and expensive RAM, but when the RAM comes free I suppose that helps a lot
We’re running off of OSX XServes for our bigger stuff. They’ve been working very well for us. The one missing component though is dual redundant power supplies. To mitigate that though, we’ve got a low priority spare and through careful setup can swap the servers by yanking a drive out of one, dumping it into the other and powering it up.
John were you surprised with the weight of them?
I remember the first one I picked up was a lot heavier then I thought it would be.