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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6717 Posts |
 Posted - Dec 03 2006 : 12:02:37 PM
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My new web server arrived on Friday and I couldn't wait to pull it out of the box and give it a try.
The machine is an IBM eServer X226 with dual 3 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon CPUs, 1 Gig of PC3200 DDR2 registered memory, 6 disk Ultra 320 SCSI RAID array and Gigabit Ethernet.
In short, it's a hell of a machine and should be massive overkill for this website.
On Friday I fired in a spare copy of Windows 2003 Server Enterprise I had lying around and honestly it's the fastest computer I have ever used. This copy of Windows is just a 180 day evaluation for me to get the website up and running on this box before going live. I'm going to be testing this website, MySQL and IIS6 for stability before I swap servers. The final operating system will be Windows 2003 Web Edition and it will go live maybe sometime around the end of December or mid January.
This new server will fix many of the problems that the old one is currently experiencing. Random downtime, dead ASP pages, serious slowdowns and the like will be a thing of the past. This IBM is highly reliable and I will be purchasing the 3 year on-site support contract from IBM. In addition this server will run with a number of failed hard drives, it can handle failing RAM modules, I'll be purchasing the redundant (DC capable) power supply and I'll be getting a new UPS with monitoring capability with the final plan to integrate a backup generator.
As you can imagine this represents a significant investment in funds (pull up the IBM site and check the retail price on the X226 to get an idea...) which has been financed by the Google ads shown on the site.
Here's a few pictures:
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cirvin
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1542 Posts |
Posted - Dec 03 2006 : 12:14:35 PM
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Groovy!
So the ads are pulling in some significant revenue? |
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6717 Posts |
Posted - Dec 04 2006 : 09:52:37 AM
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The Google ads are doing their part. I have some personal money into the server and software but I could not wait to purchase it since I need a winter project. The Google ads will pay me back eventually.
Last night I copied the website to the new machine for testing and it works brilliantly. VERY fast and no problems at all. With this much server, I'll be able to do some pretty cool stuff in upcoming updates... |
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marks256
Mad Scientist
USA
402 Posts |
Posted - Dec 07 2006 : 9:22:21 PM
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I would have started this post with "*drool*", but decided not to since it has intel processors in it. :) Lol. Nice machine, though!
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Intel: We put the 'Um...' in Pentium! |
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6717 Posts |
Posted - Dec 08 2006 : 11:46:46 AM
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Yeah, nothing fast about dual P4 Xeon 3GHz HT CPUs...  |
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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
Posted - Dec 14 2006 : 01:38:43 AM
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WOW! What a beast!
I'm really curious how fast the HDD data tranfer speed is. If it isn't a problem, could you run a benchmark and tell me the speed?
If you havn't got a HDD benchmark program use this one.
http://www.hdtune.com/
My computer gets up to 50MB/s average with IDE PATA, or whatever it is (not SATA).
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When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6717 Posts |
Posted - Dec 14 2006 : 09:48:31 AM
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My server has never been disk-speed limited, so I have the HDs set up for redundancy and not speed. I've had my share of HD failures yet never lost any data because of either mirrored volumes or stripe sets (with parity). The downside of course is that mirroring is very inefficient regarding disk space (with the 2 160GB Seagates I have in there mirrored I only get 160GB total space, of course) and there is a write penalty.
However I don't think I have to worry about speed. Yesterday my copy of Win2K3 Server arrived so I loaded it up last night. This machine loaded Win2K3 from first boot to showing a desktop in just under 30 minutes. Yeah, it's kind of quick. 
After I did the updates and what not, I started configuring the website. In theory it will be ready to go live after this weekend and I'm hoping to either get it set up next week or maybe during time-off near Christmas. |
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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
Posted - Dec 14 2006 : 6:48:23 PM
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| Yes well getting Win2003 installed in 30min is pretty damn fast as far as HDD speed goes. It takes about 30min for my computer to install windows xp PRO X86 or X64. |
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
Posted - Dec 16 2006 : 02:32:38 AM
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| I'm about to setup RAID-0 on my computer, because I am hungry for performance. My computer games, HDTV recording and other HDD intensive progs will thank me for this. I hope everything goes well, i've never done a RAID before. |
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6717 Posts |
Posted - Dec 17 2006 : 10:22:12 AM
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| RAID-0 is a stripe set without parity. It will offer increased performance somewhat, but offers no redundancy. When one drive fails, the entire array is lost. If you are going to use striping, then set up a stripe set with parity (RAID5). You will need at least 3 drivs but any single drive can fail and data will not be lost. |
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wasssup1990
Nobel Prize Winner
A Land Down Under
2261 Posts |
Posted - Dec 17 2006 : 7:00:23 PM
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I just read in the manual that my mobo doesn't support RAID on PATA, only on SATA. Oh well, can't setup a RAID without SATAs.
My mobo supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5 and JBOD. |
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. |
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6717 Posts |
Posted - Dec 18 2006 : 09:23:26 AM
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| If you are running Windows NT, 2K, XP, 2K3 or Vista you can set up RAID in software. Right click My Computer, select Manage, then use Disk Manager. |
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New Server!
