Our DL380 G5 Servers Turn Two Years Old
Happy Birthday, My Babies!
It was two years ago that the team at xtendx setup a pair of new servers at a 'proper' hosting company, Aspectra, with quality infrastructure, engineers and network peering in support of new, demanding customer requirements. (Our previous hosting company was second rate, at best, and our entry level servers were getting old.) After shopping for a new hosting company, and selecting Aspectra, we then began analysis/negotiations regarding the hardware. Our requirements boiled down to these critical items:
Note that on both server chassis one of the hard disk drives' handle is ajar. This picture was taken during the initial setup and configuration, and the drive is disconnected to test that a) the RAID1 array does not fail, and b) the monitoring system reports a failure to the engineers.
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- Hardware Vendor must be an industry leader and well supported by hosting company
- Support from the hardware vendor for a modern flavor of Linux
- The hardware itself should have a solid degree of internal redundancy
- Expandable/upgradable in the future
- There should be a 'hot backup' server
- A large, shared, performant, fully backed-up file system
- (2x) HP DL380 G5 - purchased
- A single E5320 "Clovertown" 4-core 1.86GHz Intel Xeon CPU (other CPU socket is open)
- 4GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM in 2 modules (6 slots free)
- A pair of 10k RPM 72GB 2.5" disks in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
- (1x) HP MSA 1500 - shared, leased
- (4) 300GB 3.5" drives in a RAID 1+0 (mirrored + stripping) configuration
- Fiber Optic SAS connection
Front View
Note that on both server chassis one of the hard disk drives' handle is ajar. This picture was taken during the initial setup and configuration, and the drive is disconnected to test that a) the RAID1 array does not fail, and b) the monitoring system reports a failure to the engineers.
Rear View
(Larger Image)Again, note that one of the power supplies is disconnected and has no green power light. This photograph was also taken while the servers were undergoing initial setup and configuration, and the power cable is disconnected to test that a) the continues to function with only one power supply, and b) the monitoring system reports a failure to the administrators.
(Original) Storage Array
(Larger Image)Four of these 300GB drives were dedicated to our servers, giving us a usable ~575GB of space. Since the system was built up we have expanded our storage twice. Now the storage is in another chassis and we have ~1.5TB to work with.
We made a solid choice with these servers and they should last us another two or three years, even with current customer growth and additional features accounted for. While we have not upgraded the memory or CPUs yet, that is sure to happen in the next year. That said, the current platform's limitations have forced me to continuously tune my application in multiple dimensions: reduce memory consumption, reduce CPU load, and keeping response times low. This has been a good thing for both my application and my programming skills.
Anyway, "Happy Birthday", my babies!
We made a solid choice with these servers and they should last us another two or three years, even with current customer growth and additional features accounted for. While we have not upgraded the memory or CPUs yet, that is sure to happen in the next year. That said, the current platform's limitations have forced me to continuously tune my application in multiple dimensions: reduce memory consumption, reduce CPU load, and keeping response times low. This has been a good thing for both my application and my programming skills.
Anyway, "Happy Birthday", my babies!