When we first started Wahanda we made the decision to have an all Mac OSX development environment. This has served us pretty well over the last year or 2 and the Mac is a great platform. For those like myself who only gets involved in PHP development with a single windows VM for SQL Server it’s still working great.
However our primary site platform now spans a fair few Java Webapps. Running 2 tomcats + VM’s for IE6, IE8 etc. has got to the point where the standard test-amend-compile-test cycle can be in the order of minutes. This was understandably causing a lot of complaints!
So, we all sat down and had a long discussion about what to do. I would love to be in a position to buy everyone dual quad-core Mac Pros but we really don’t have that sort of money at the moment. So with general agreement we decided to move to a more generic hardware platform running Debian Linux (We did debate using Ubuntu but as the servers are all Debian it was decided to go for consistency).
Chris went away and played with some options and ended up with this spec:
- Asus P5QL Pro Motherboard
- Intel Core2 Quad @ 2.66Ghz
- 2 x Crucial 4Gb DDR2 RAM
- GeForce 9600GT Dual DVI Video
- 2 x 250Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm HDD
- Various cheepy cheep ATX cases
This is at least a doubling of the previous developer MacBooks. 2 more cores, twice the RAM and RAIDED drives rather than the rather pathetic 5400rpm notebook drives from before.
The following diagram is just the 2 tomcats starting up. That capacity really is needed!
This one is building the entire site stack. Doesn’t suck up quite as much as an init of the environment but the spread of load across the 4 cores is great to see.
Overall we’ve reduced the test-amend-compile-test back to only a few seconds. An enormous boost to productivity in the team. The downside was that we lost everyone who made the switch for 2 straight days why they got everything set up.
The marketing / design / copy team are also very happy with their pass-me-down MacBooks. 
We’re currently in the process of setting up a bunch of servers in the u.k. to deal with European traffic on the site.
Something I was surprised to find out last year was that the most limited commodity in London regarding hosting is not space or bandwidth, it’s power. One nameless ISP told me that it will remain this way until after the London 2012 Olympics as they’re sucking up all the excess capacity!
Our initial allotment is for only 4A. This really isn’t much when a single one of our dev machines (the ones we use to host internally, build things on and test on etc.) draws around 0.9A. Out initial estimate for servers was for a base install of 6 so these machines aren’t really going to work.
Those guys at Dell are producing some more efficient boxes these days which means our primary web stack can run in just 0.5A (Single Quad-core Xeons). Our main db server is likely to be at least 1A so we needed something even more efficient than the dells for the network config.
At home I’ve built a number of machines as media servers or lightweight web machines using the Mini-ITX format. I was therefore quite excited to hear about a bundle being offered by mini-itx.com which included a dual-core Atom based ITX Mainboard, a couple of gigs of RAM, all housed in a 1U Rack Case.
Inside the Atom 1U Rackserver (aeryn)
As you can see we have an ITX board, 2 SATA drives (80Gb mirrored) and not much else in the box. Witbh this config we have a power draw of around 0.31A. Not quite as low as the 0.15A advertised by MiniITX but we have gone for the dual core atom + 2 drives so not surprising it’s higher.
We also experimented with a 2Gb flash drive in place of once of the HDD to see if it would bring down the power. It didn’t that much so we went with the slightly more robust full RAID1 mirror instead. This seems to be the way things are going though so hopefully we’ll be able to move all of the infrastructure type servers to full SSD in the medium term.
2Gb SATA Drive (Flash)