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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Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Noted, just thought some teaser pics might be nice but if everyone wants to wait for the full thing I can do it that way :)Take care,
Anand
theangryintern - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
I actually enjoy the teasers and am really looking forward to the full article. Sounds like a fun project.quiksilvr - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Ignore Brian23. He just wishes he was 23 again when he made his username. We are loving this!nafhan - Friday, October 29, 2010 - link
Teasers don't rule out a consolidated article, do they? I'd like to have both.Stuka87 - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Personally I like the little teaser bits :)sirmixmasta - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Seriously, you guys can't pay for your own equipment with all the money this site rakes in from adds? You really need to beg for $7,500 worth of free memory handouts? Nice this is a public testbed spin...Speedye1 - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Dude get off your high horse. As a longtime reader, I have no problem with him being upfront about how the hardware was acquired and see nothing wrong with it. I also like the gradual updates personally.theangryintern - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
I'm sure they *could* pay for the upgrades themselves, but when you can get companies to donate hardware, it's much more fun. Plus it's good advertising for the companies that do agree to donate. So it's really a win for everyone.brianlee2007 - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
look dude, just because someone owns a site doesn't mean the man has a million bucks. plus who's to say Kingston isn't the one who jumped on this opportunity for some more advertisement. moreover, anyone would accept generous contribution to their project so please save your naive opinion to yourself and think before you speak (or post) next time.maxusa - Friday, October 29, 2010 - link
Yes, brainlee2007, it does mean millions. For your information, by Anand's own admission in February this year, this online publication turns "below 5 but at least 3 million a year" in revenue. He "broke" a $1M mark by the time he went to college.