In Phase A, DS9 is the most powerful server in the setup. With dual AMD 1800MP chips, 1.5GB of RAM and two 15K RPM Cheatah’s running on a RAID 1, the server is still not the bottleneck during intense loads on the 3 webservers.

We judged DS9 as being the most important server in the entire setup, even after Phase B – as the sole database server, it is the single point of failure that would cripple the site in its entirety. The server was built with a Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW board – which was rock solid throughout 2 whole weeks of stress and stability testing. We initially tried using the MSI MS-6501 dual athlon board for this particular server because of its robustness of features, but the MS-6501 proved to be less stable than the Gigabyte when paired with the Adaptec SCSI RAID cards, so we opted for stability.

The entire system is housed in Antec’s incredible IPC 3426B 4U rackmount server enclosure paired with their SmartPower PP303X power supply. This is easily one of the most solid and perfectly designed 4U rackmount cases. Period. You can see from the server specs that this enclosure provides 4 Sunon 90mm fans. These fans are hot-swappable and are all connected to their own power switch. The case is also made from a heavy sheetmetal that reduced flexing, and you can see from the cross-bar that this case is extremely stable.

The spaciousness of the 4U case was important for two reasons:

1) to avoid the need of riser cards for expansion cards
2) because we wanted to ensure that the 1800MP chips had no chance of overheating.
3) Airflow was unrestricted, and cables could be managed with the least amount of obstruction of the fans

Again, the entire design of DS9 was on the concept of stability, and performance. Our past experience has lead us to shy away from risers as much as possible, for the sake of stability: our experience through this server project only reinforces that line of thought.

It may not be apparent from the still pictures, but the airflow and cooling of the Antec case is simply amazing. And the results are tangible: this is one of the most stable servers in the cluster, and also one of the coolest. Bottom Line: for highest stability in this uber high powered server, the 4U case was critical.