It’s been many weeks since the new servers went live – so far Phase A of the server project has been a tremendous success; Neoseeker now runs smoother then ever, performance is through the roof, and our total capacity goals were achieved perfectly. In fact, even during peak hours, most of our dynamic scripts and pages generate in less then 0.3 seconds. That’s a nearly 40 fold increase in performance over our previous (and totally underpowered) server setup.
Our server project is also a success in that it represents the next step in computer building for us – selecting the parts to build the servers required a lot of planning, and making everything come together was a challenge in itself, but now that everything is live, the performance gains are phenomenal.
Our decision to go with the various parts also worked out really well for us. The Webmux load balancer shaved off a lot of prep time from our server deployment, and it continues to be a gem when it comes to managing our server farm. When we next move to Phase B and beyond, the Webmux will really help ease our transition to more servers and farms.
Parts-wise, we were extremely pleased with several of the key components, such as the superb Seagate 15K RPM SCSI drives paired with their Adaptec SCSI cards, the Gigabyte and Tyan mainboards, and each of the enclosures from Antec, Lian-Li, and Elan Vital . When we go to Phase B of the server project, we will again re-use many of these components – not only because we know them to be high perfomance parts, but also because we can be assured of their stability in our environment after intensive testing and nearly 2 months of production use.
In the future, too, we plan on making heavy use of Seagate’s 15K RPM Cheetah drives and Corsair's DDR RAM in other similar projects. The Seagate drives are not only lightning fast, we found them to be extremely quiet and relatively cool-running (we were very concerned about heat issues when we first started to use them, because some 10K RPM drives tend to run a little hot). In fact, we’re very tempted to try and setup an ultimate gaming system using a few of these super drives ;).
Hopefully this article gives you an idea of how you might plan and design your own servers, and what you might want to you employ when it’s time to build and deploy them. Feel free to even reproduce our exact servers for your own use ;). Look out also for our follow-up with Phase B of the server project, when we set up 2-3 more servers in the cluster.
We’d love to hear from you about your experiences with building your own servers, whether they be for a website, or for your home network.
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