AnandTech 2010 Server Upgrade: The Memory
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 28, 2010 1:14 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Site Updates
A couple of months ago we shared with you the CPUs that are going into our new server farm. We've actually started physically installing the machines (hence the brief outage over the weekend) so it's time to share another piece of the server puzzle.
The final configuration we decided on was 12 machines. This is a significant reduction of the number of systems we have installed (currently nearly 30) but the performance per box is much higher, allowing for consolidation through virtualization.
We are building two private clouds: a lighter cloud of 8 machines for our application serving needs (including some redundancy in the cloud), and a 4 machine DB cloud to handle the heavier IO. We'll dive into our infrastructure design in the later, full article but for now let's talk about memory.
The application server cloud is light on memory. Each system in this cloud has 12GB of memory (6 x 2 DDR3-1333 DIMMs). The DB server cloud on the other hand has 48GB of memory per box (12 x 4GB DDR3-1333 DIMMs).
Kingston was nice enough to supply the memory for our project with. The 96 sticks of memory were broken down into 48 x KVR1333D3D4R9S/4GI and 48 x KVR1333D3D8R9S/2GI. If you want to see what 288GB of memory looks like, check out the gallery below.
Note that for all of the components we selected for this project, we decided upon the components first and then petitioned the manufacturers second. The stipulation was that the AnandTech server farm would be a publicly visible test bed. Any failures of the hardware are public failures and would obviously reflect poorly on the manufacturer. For CPUs and memory it's not so big of a deal - physical failures there are fairly rare, but for SSDs this provided an interesting challenge. More on that in our next installment.
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nbjknk - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
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Zoomer - Monday, November 8, 2010 - link
Ok, would you mind sending AT a check to cover the server costs? And oh, turn off ABP when you're at it too.Reviews in some segments has been less broad and deep lately, but I guess that reflects Anand's changing focus. Unfortunately, I have not been really interested in the products of a certain company he likes to cover.
vvume - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
I do think there is a valid concern here. The manufacturer can cherry pick the best of the lot when delivering components to Anandtech. A typical buyer may not get equally well tested components, skewing the reliability of the product.Nehemoth - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
if they do not publish this information, you'd never heard.If they are able to publish this information obviously because they are transparent.
Anandtech is a site which fully trusted, in fact it was something recently discussed here
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3988/the-use-of-evga...
kimmer2k - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
who cares...WillyMcNilly - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
When you fail to read articles properly and get pwned, your integrity is lost.Thermogenic - Saturday, October 30, 2010 - link
Politicians receive campaign funds in a transparent manner as well, Are you saying that means they aren't influenced by the funds?SlyNine - Sunday, October 31, 2010 - link
Do politicians come out in their ad campaigns and tell you who funds them.Are you really saying they are as transparent as Anand is being here, REALLY!!??.
You are using fallacies every time you bring this up. You are appealing to emotion and committing the straw man.
dingo13 - Sunday, November 7, 2010 - link
Well, nobody is holding you back when you decide to leave this site and never come back. For me the published reviews so far have been accurate and I do not care if they get their server memory for free.Brian23 - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Rather than posting little updates here and there, why not just put together a whole article like you did a few years back when you upgraded the system. This is dragging out way too long.