Page 3 Tour Cont w/ more Pictures
When we have a look at the backside of the rack we can see how anal I am when it comes to cable management, nice and tidy eh? :) All the way up top you can see our new 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.
The long red wire travels towards 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 :)
Here's a weird looking dude who is connecting the new forums server. The power outlets are connected to reboot ports. Our servers are monitored by two host servers, one in Amsterdam/Netherlands and one in London/England. Should one of the Guru3D servers fail to respond it will alert Guru3D staff as they will receive email alerts and after 60 seconds downtime .. yes we'll receive SMS alerts.
So our servers are connected to reboot ports. Should God forbid a server crash completely you do not want to drive 200 KM to the data-center just to reset the server. This is where reboot ports come in, if you look down where the one orange wire connects to a box. That's the reboot port. That way remotely you can cut off power from the server and have it restarted again, pretty medieval yet quite effective.
One last glimpse from the the rack G1... or as I refer to... Guru 1. And bam... that's the end to our little behind the scenes article. This configuration is currently responsible for pushing 300k-400k pageviews each and every day.
I hope you enjoyed this little tour.
Hilbert