Behind AnandTech - APPRO's 1124 760MP Server: The Perfect Server?

The Perfect Server?

If you’ve read up to this point you’ll realize that every single problem we anticipated having with the 760MP platform has been addressed by APPRO with the 1124. 

The performance of the server is incredible, but we must accredit that to AMD and Tyan for putting together such an incredible combination.  The biggest limitation we encountered was the maximum of 4 memory banks on the motherboard; unfortunately this limitation won’t be addressed until platforms supporting AMD’s upcoming 64-bit x86-64 Hammer solution arrives next year. 

The size of the 1124 makes it very attractive for use in datacenter environments where the more you can fit into a rack, the cheaper your average costs get.  The 1U form factor of the 1124’s chassis is made possible in part by the highly integrated nature of the Thunder K7 motherboard. 

The dual on-board 3Com Ethernet controllers are perfect for servers since they allow you to maintain a public connection to the Internet and a private LAN connection as well.  In our situation, the private LAN connection is perfect since we want all of our web servers to communicate with the database server across our backend 100Mbps full-duplex private LAN instead of going through the external network.  The on-board ATI Rage XL video isn't useful for 3D acceleration, but in a server environment where most administration is done remotely, high end graphics isn't too important.  And although we didn't make use of it, the on-board Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI controller is useful if you're not going to be doing any I/O intensive serving.  In our case, we took advantage of the single PCI slot and installed an AMI MegaRAID controller to drive our RAID 10 array.

We must give credit to APPRO (as well as VA Linux) for designing the case that truly carries a bigger bite than its bark would let off.  When moving it into the datacenter during last week's server upgrade no one had an idea just how powerful this tiny system was.  Looks can be deceiving and with the APPRO 1124 you'd hardly guess that enclosed in the 1U chassis is the most powerful dual processor x86 platform money can buy. 

AMD provided the platform to do it, Tyan supplied the motherboard, and APPRO added their elegant touch to make this truly the perfect server; it shouldn't be much of a surprise as to exactly why we chose it to run our most demanding database serving application. 

To all of our faithful readers and AnandTech Community members, we hope you enjoy the speed.