Rackmount Server: Aberdeen Stirling S15 Dual Xeon :: The Server: Hardware

I am presenting the server here as I broke it down and reassembled the unit.

Here you can see a small plastic layer designed to prevent the motherboard from short circuiting.

Case and airflow is a special design to cool down, two dual Xeon CPU's in a 1U space. Two powerful blowers, blow through two special heatsinks to cool down those aggressive CPU's.

How can you install an add-on PCI card in 1U space? There are two 64-bit PCI-X slots. One supports 66MHz the other supports 133MHz. There is a riser card, that when installed, lets you install two PCI cards horizontally. You may adjust the PCI slot types to any type; 33/66 MHz 32/64-bit and PCI/PCI-X using jumpers. Only one of the slots supports 64-bit PCI-X 133 MHz card.

Mylex is one of the best SCSI and RAID card manufacturer out there. Instead of a cost effective solution, the Stirling S15 carries a Mylex AcceleRAID 160 (Retail name AcceleRAID 170) which supports RAID 5. So how can you fit three hard drives with a Raid 5 configuration without any cable hassles while maintaining airflow? There is only one connector for the SCSI cable. Three hot swappable hard drive trays connect to a special SCSI backplane. This backplane has a GEM chip on it and when you install the correct driver, the OS recognizes all the hard drives as a single device. There are no warnings anywhere about this so you have to remember to install the GEM driver.

Raid 5 logic is not hard. For every hard drive, 2/3 of it contains its own data, and 1/3 is contains the data of another drive. So two drives together carries the complete data of the third hard drive. If a drive fails the other two drives take over without losing data. This system also supports hot-swap, so you can do everything without shutting down the system. When one drive fails, just take that drive out and slide in a new one. The Mylex tools will help to rebuild the RAID-5 array again.

There is a slim CD-ROM drive and a slim floppy drive for loading drivers. These slim drives are actually notebook drives. This is the only way you can fit them into front panel because of the three hot swappable hard drive trays.

You need a good power supply to pump energy 24/7 for two powerful CPU's, three harddrives, and a CD-ROM. You have to fit that PS into a 1U case. You cannot install two power supplies into a 1U space, so it cannot be hot swappable. At the least it has to be easy to change. The 400W power supply of the server can be changed in two minutes including opening the cover. There are no cables. You slide the power supply directly to a slot type of connector.

You can see five LEDs on the front panel. The first one is the heat alarm. The second and third ones show fast and gigabit ethernet connections. The forth one shows the hard drive activity and the fifth one shows if the power is on. Other than the standard power and reset buttons, the NMI button creates a non maskable interrupt to force the server into halt state. Briefly it is for diagnostic purposes. You will also see two USB connections on the front panel. You can connect a USB flash or USB hard drive easily for service and data transfer. The RJ45 connection on the front panel is for future use. That might be designed for a new motherboard, and it will be used for UNIX or Linux console purposes.

On the back panel you will see the classic PS2 keyboard and mouse connectors. There is no parallel port but 2 USB ports for printer or USB drives. The Serial port is still there for console connections or external modem connections. You will see two SCSI ports in the back panel. One from the on-board SCSI adapter and the other from the Mylex card to connect external SCSI devices, such as JBOD, backup, or other storage devices. The Gigabit and Fast ethernet connectors are also in the back.

Now it is tome to close the case. Inside part of the cover, you will see a very detailed scheme of the motherboard. There are jumper settings printed on it if you would like to install an add-on card. This is very handy for future usability.

The package is rich. You will find all the rails and tools to mount it in a rack. Manuals for both the motherboard and the server, Mylex SCSI manual, and installation CD's for all of them.