An Inside Look At TTZ

This is the home of The TechZone and TTZ Media Network – the colo data center at NetNation Communication, located on the second floor of the Bentall 5, in downtown Vancouver.

Colo room

Below is the cage that houses the servers that powers TTZ and three other technology based sites. We’ll start at the top and move down.

TTZ Servers

There are three Dell 1850 servers in total. Each server runs dual Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs with 4 Gigs of DDR2 RAM, and two 10,000 RPM Ultra 320 SCSI drives in RAID 1. The servers also feature dual power supply in case one fails. Cost? $4,000 each.

The very top server is the ad server. It serves ads to the TTZ Media Network sites and nothing else. Below that is the Apache server that powers the front end of The TechZone.

Below the Apache server is a custom made 2U server that powers Auphan Online and Auphan Software. I do not know the specs of this server. Auphan is the company that designed the software that powers the TTZ Media advertising engine.

Moving down we see what looks to be a very powerful Dell 2650 2U server. However, that’s not the case. It’s really a custom 1U Intel server with dual Xeon 2.8 and 2Gigs of DDR RAM, two 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 1. This server is used to power Futurelooks.com, a TTZ Media Network affiliate. We found the Dell 2650 faceplate laying around at the server room and decided to put it on so Futurelooks can feel cool. I call it the Rice Server.

Below the Rice Server is TTZ database server. This Dell 1850 has the same specs as the other two 1850 except this unit use faster 15,000 RPM SCSI drives, also in RAID 1. Below the DB servers is a Silverstone case housing the only Windows box. We use this box as a game server.

Below the game server is a 2U server that powers HardCoreWare.net, another TTZ Media Network affiliate. His server is a P4 with 2 Gigs of RAM and 74Gig 10K SATA Raptor. He also has a 250 Gig 7200RPM drive for back up. Since that photo was taken, HardCoreWare has upgraded their server to a 1U Dell 850.

Hidden from the picture is a very expensive Cisco Enterprise level 24 port switch that connects all the servers to the internet. As you can see, the cage is pretty full. Any future expansion will require that I order up another cage. However, most likely we will dump the game server before doing that.