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The great server switch

Posted on 8 Aug 2008 at 18:05

Steve Cassidy's server hardware is ancient, reliable but incredibly power hungry. He takes us for a tour, and explains why it's time for an upgrade.

Welcome to my basement. Or at least, my servers.

In our first photo is my exceptionally fine collection of enormous, and thoroughly out of date, server hardware. This isn't my review or test kit pile, these are my own machines. From the bottom, we have an exceedingly rare HP RS16 external SCSI disk shed - now denuded of SCSI drives, formerly home to a whopping 360GB of storage.

This was connected back to the lower of those two HP LP2000R's (that's Iggy), which is my internal Domain Controller, and above that, hibernating, is my Cobalt Raq: then a bit of an air gap, and the email and software installer (Bowie) and above it the smoothwall dedicated firewall server, which is an HP LP1000R for variety.

That one's offline, as is the ancient LH, which makes the whole cabinet so heavy light bends in it's vicinity, or at least, that's my excuse for the rubbish photography.

Why haven't I updated this yet? Well, partly because machines come and go around it a lot, and partly because the LP2000R is an astonishingly reliable, heat-tolerant, well built platform. Also, that lot has been running for five years, since I rescued it from its preceding job (OCR'ing your income tax cheques, but I can't tell you where) - so the impetus to get upgraded has been pretty low.

Time for an update

Until this year. All that reliability is bought at a pretty hefty cost. I reckon that rack draws about 800 watts: and these days, all the jobs those boxes do - even when they are all turned on - fit inside the machine you can see below.

This is an ML115, which means it has a dual-core Athlon, a weird chipset which mixes a Nvidia motherboard chipset with Matrox display components, and a very obscure Nvidia SATA RAID controller.

With three 750GB "green" variable-spin Western Digital drives in the box and 8GB of RAM, I get just a bit more performance than the LP2000's will serve up and the same degree of drive fault tolerance but at 1/8th the power draw. When the RS16 was plugged in, I was hitting nearly 2KW load, hence the current lack of disks!

The ML115 is actually going to ensure the continued existence of both Iggy and Bowie, because in the spirit of the cobbler's shoes, I'm going to throw each of them through VMWare converter and bring them up, none the wiser for the experience, inside VMWare for Windows under 64-bit Server, hence the 8GB of RAM.

I hate to think how many fluffy bunnies will be able to hop about unimpeded, downwind from Drax or in the fallout zone around Wylfa, as a result of my upgrade, but I will certainly be seeing a slower-moving power meter, and living with a cooler, quieter basement. All I have to do is find someone to take the old rack away...

Author: Steve Cassidy