3 - The servers
Here we see a selection of the front- and backend servers utilized by Guru3D.com
- corleone.guru3d.com is a forum server
- mafia.guru3d.com is a forum server
- godfather.guru3d.com is the primary content server responsible for all news, articles and ads.
- goodfellah.guru3d.com is a database server
- soprano.guru3d.com is a database server
- scarface.guru3d is the CMS server for the download section
Now before you start emailing me: yes we have this mob theme going on. I don't know how it started, I'm just a big fan of the Godfather and that expanded somehow. You'll notice that all staff in the forums are named after Don's in terms of custom titles. The equipment is all named after something mob like .. so hey .. that's all there is to it.
Most of the these servers are either AMD dual-core Opteron based or (the newer ones) Intel Xeon Dual/Quad core, have 2GB to 8GB ECC memory and configured at RAID1 with mostly hot-swappable 150 GB drives. All servers have dual Ethernet 1000baseTX full-duplex.
Spaghetti !
A look at the backside of the rack, nice and tidy eh? :) All the way up top you can see the first switch we use, a Netgear switch. This is a 24-port Gigabit switch. When you have a lot of internal database traffic, you really want to go for fast GBit/sec connectivity. So this switch functions purely as a separated VLAN for internal communication among the servers.
Moving upwards in the rack here's where cabling is getting a little more complex. But all servers obviously need an uplink, they merge here are Cisco Catalyst series 3500 gigabit, a fiber optical switch (the green one in the middle).
This switch then connects to the core router from our host which on it's end will mostly route you over the Amsterdam Internet Exchange backbone (Europe's biggest backbone) and for the USA over Cogent. There are six others though so chances are pretty high you can access Guru3D.com at any location globally.
