1 - A flashy introduction

Guru3D Behind the scenes - the servers 2008

Hello everyone,

Last year we published a little article regarding the "innards" of Guru3D. It turned out to be quite a popular article as there is a lot of interest from you guys to see the hardware behind this hardware website. Today we'll continue with part two. Late last year we have moved out from the server-park towards a new co-location facility. We also had some new servers installed.

Earlier this week we again drove to the datacenter to install our newest server "Corleone", a new front-end server that is soon going to be used for our rapidly growing forums. We'll show you the specs and some insider info on that server later on. First let's have a look at where we are hosted, the racks, the gear and the network we are broadcasting over.

Guru3D.com's servers are stationed in the DataBarn 2 datacenter, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We are "co-located" by the good people from Mediaserve.

Three years ago, to cut costs, we used to have our servers located in the USA and Australia. A year and a half ago after an incident in Australia I decided to have them located close-by and have the servers managed by internal staff members.

Currently to manage our content we make use of four web servers and two database servers. In addition to that at different geographical locations in the world we also have file-mirrors. Sweden has a guru3d.com file-server, Greece has a file-server, the USA has a file-server and in Australia we outsourced our file-hosting.

So for pure content, located in the datacenter are six servers, and for our file-distribution another four servers. The file-servers are located globally to assure that you guys can pick a spot which is close by to you and thus hopefully files will download faster for you.

Today it's all about the six content servers, as these are the ones located in the Amsterdam Datacenter. The datacenter has over 4000 m² of total space. It comes with hefty security measures and has redundant backup power generators and airconditioners. Well it was built ground up to be a professional data-center, and it shows.

The datacenter is divided into several segments and rooms, and within these rooms we can find data suites. In these data-suites you'll notice the boringly white colored cabinets called racks. The data suites are kept at a steady 21 degrees C temperature and a 50% humidity level to ensure the servers are not overheating due to ambient air temperature.

I already mentioned that this is a very secure location not only to keep people out, yet also in terms of protection of the equipment. You'll notice that it's protected with

• Video security cameras in and outside the building
• Aspiration Smoke Detection Apparatus
• Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus
• MIST fire suppression system
• Proximity Access Cards
• 24/7 security staff

Furthermore also very simple yet effective stuff... for example the racks are equipped with locks, so that very few people can actually access the servers.

When we pass the security and enter the data-suite we can locate racks. Each rack holds a multitude of servers and these servers are connected to switches and routers which are, in turn, connected directly to the internet backbone.

We are located into a network with 10.3 Gbps capacity build based on foundry equipment. The network has been built with uptime in mind as it's a ringbus architecture which basically boils down to this: if a datacenter cable, port, switch or server fails the connectivity it will automatically be forwarded over the next best available connection.

For the true Guru's, we make use of the following uplinks (internet backbones) to get the data served to you:

Exchanges:

• AMS-IX (Amsterdam - 2000baseSX)
• LINX (Londen - 100baseTX)
• BNIX (Brussel - 1000baseSX)
• NL-IX & OpenPeering (Amsterdam - 1000baseSX)
• FreeBIX (Brussel - 100baseTX)

Transits:

• TeliaSonera (2000baseSX)
• Interoute (1000baseSX)
• Cogent Communications (1000baseSX)
• JointTransit (1000baseSX)

Private Peering:

• KPN-IS (1000baseSX)

Optimus Prime arrived at the datacenter. That's yours truly by the way.