Effyis is an Internet technology company which operates BoardReader.com, a Message Board search engine. The purpose of BoardReader is to provide users with the ability to find and display human-to-human conversations occurring on the Web's forums and message boards.
Indexing the world's forums and message boards requires a lot of server power. Due to our unique web crawling requirements, we were looking for a next generation server that was powerful yet used minimal power and occupied a small physical footprint. Our web crawlers are deployed in a dedicated cage environment at a local colocation facility. To maximize server density we are using 2-post racks instead of typical equipment cabinets. The servers had to work in this environment.
What is significant with our solution is the density of servers we are achieving per square foot and per circuit. The server we chose for this role is the Dell PowerEdge R210. We are able to get 42 servers into each 2-Post rack. The racks are placed a few inches apart in our cage. There is an overhead metal frame that each 2-post rack secures to which keeps the racks from sagging/moving. We have a local machine shop fabricating custom rack mounts for this configuration. They are much sturdier and less expensive than those available thru Dell. Our new configuration (as illustrated in photo) is to power a pair a 2-Post racks with a single 20A 120V 3-phase circuit. We are using Y-cables so each outlet on the 42 plug APC PDU can power 2 servers. This allows us to run 84 servers on a single circuit/PDU. As a comparison, with our original configuration for web crawler racks (using non-Dell white box servers) we used more power for a single 2-Post rack of servers (40 servers) than we now use for two 2-post racks (84 servers). The cost savings are significant for MRC since we are billed per circuit.