Behind AnandTech - APPRO's 1124 760MP Server: The Perfect Server?

Behind AnandTech - The Server Pictures

Other than the addition of this new database server, nothing much has changed in the datacenter. If you're interested in seeing other behind the scenes images of what our servers look like, have a glance at our three other Behind AnandTech articles listed below:

Behind AnandTech - 2001 Server Upgrade - 4/17/2001

Behind AnandTech - Upgrading the Server Farm - 1/16/2001

Behind AnandTech - The Search for the Perfect Servers - 8/23/2000

Below you can see both of our racks with doors wide open. The black cases in the rightmost rack are mostly AnandTech Forums web servers. The white cases in the center rack are AnandTech web/mail servers, and the empty space between them is where one of the larger 5U cases was removed and replaced with the very small 1U APPRO server. You can barely see it in comparison to the larger 4U and 5U racks.

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Just for comparison purposes, if all of our servers were moved to APPRO's 1U platform we'd take up no more than half of a rack instead of the one and a half racks we currently use. It's too bad no Athlon motherboards other than the Tyan Thunder K7 will work in a 1U chassis, not to mention that finding 1U Athlon compliant power supplies is very difficult. If all of our web servers needed the power of the 760MP it'd be a different situation entirely.

Here is a better gauge of exactly how much smaller this 1U box is in spite of its performance advantage over our much larger solutions. That's me behind the rack about to take off the rear panel to install the 2GB of DDR SDRAM that arrived at the datacenter just in time to make it in before we left.