While we wanted the highest in performance and stability for DS9, the rest of our webservers were built with compactness and space savings as major in mind. Surely performance and stability were still issues, but these were issues that had to be dealt with while making the most of a limited amount of rackspace. Hence all of the high powered webservers, like Enterprise, were to be built using 2U rackmount enclosures.

The problems raised by building a 2U rackmount Athlon server are not easy to overcome. In deciding to try to build these servers, we discovered the need to match carefully selected components.

One of the first requirements is a suitable motherboard: one that had slanted RAM slots and a 64bit PCI slot as the 6th slot on the board to allow the use of a 64bit riser in a 2U rackmount server.

Of all the Dual Athlon boards on the market, only Tyan offered such a board. Tyan has long been legendary for their stability and their expertise in motherboards. If we had more time, and had we been crazy enough, we could have built 1U servers using the Tyan Thunder boards, thanks to its integrated LAN and SCSI. As it were, we wanted RAID, and we didn’t have the specialized equipment to keep a 1U, Dual Athlon rig safely cool, so we built 2U servers.

You can see from our picture documentation that the slanted RAM slots are critical in the 2U environment, partially because the ECC DDR RAM is half again as tall as regular DDR RAM (due to the parity chips taking up this extra space), and partially because you simply cannot afford to obstruct the airflow in such a tightly confined space. The riser itself presents no small challenge. Thankfully, TYAN makes a riser compatible with the Thunder, and also compatible with both 64bit and 32bit expansion cards.

The enclosure we used, the Lian-Li IP-20 aluminum 2U enclosure, is not quite as robust looking as the Antec 2U server used for one of the other webservers: Defiant, but it is lighter and has superior heat dissipating qualities. You will also note that the IP-20 has a large number of fans: 2 intake fans in front of the drive cages, and 3 more fans pulling air into the main area of the case. The two front intake 80mm fans, rated at 39CFM and 32dba, were good for peace of mind: we were worried that the cramped environment and the 15KRPM Cheetah drives would cause heat problems. The

Using the TYAN Thunder motherboard presented no small challenges of its own. Because of its unique power requirements, we had to use a special power supply: Zippy made one such power supply, the massive, and hefty P2G-6460P 435W 2U PSU.

Part of the 2U puzzle was also in the choice of coolers. We ended up using AVC’s Skived FAN all copper cooler for the entire project. The cooler is rated up to AMD 1800XP, and its low profile design allowed it the proper clearance for effective air movement in the 3.5” tall case.

Cable management became a prime concern for this server as well. By carefully arranging the cables, you can see we reduced clutter as much as possible. In spite of this, we were extremely worried about the airflow – and with good cause: the server, under load, expelled a huge amount of hot air.