24th July 2008
Server Hardware
At KDA Web Services we have a policy on hardware use, that means no matter how much you spend on your server with us, or no matter what a servers internal use, it will meet a minimum standard of hardware. What this means for you, as a customer of KDA Web Services, is that you can rest assured that your website/data is tried and tested hardware, designed for use 24 hours a day.
Server Cases
We only use 19" Rackmount servers, designed for systems that need to run 24 hours a day, you won't find a single desktop, mini-tower or other normal PC case anywhere in our equipment racks, why? These cases just aren't designed to be used in close proximity to each other, they aren't designed with cooling in mind or for 24x7 operation or with adequate power supplies.
On their own, the cases we use, cost more than some of our competitors spend on a complete machine - If you think about it, how hot does your PC get? Now imagine 10-15 of them in an enclosed rack, would you really want your data stored on them? The rackmount cases we use are designed for optimum cooling and 24x7 operation, running much cooler than a standard PC.
Motherboard
We take the selection of motherboards very carefully, testing them in our testbed before we make a live deployment, after all, the motherboard ultimately controls every aspect of your server. Years of experience has taught us that it isn't just what the motherboard can do that is important, but how it is physically layed out, poor layout can mean cables impeeding airflow, poor cooling of CPU and other vital components. Today we only use motherboards from recognised leaders, such as Tyan and Gigabyte.
Data Integrity
Along with quality cases, there is one more item that we insist goes in every single server we build, RAID hardware. At KDA Web Services we don't believe your data should be put at risk, that is why we insist every server we build, uses at least RAID Level 1, where the data is written to two disk drives, rather than just one - Then if one should fail, the other will still have a working copy of your data and the server will continue to run. As we use Hot Swap cases, it's then just a matter of pulling the failed drive out of the server, replacing it with a new one and letting the server re-mirror the data to the new drive, to gain full redundancy again.
Memory
We only use quality, branded RAM from reputable suppliers, we won't use what is commonly called, "Major on 3rd", which is a major manufacturers memory chips, but on a 3rd party circuit board - Often these have a high failure rate in servers in our experience, so now we only use branded RAM from the likes of Crucial, Kingston and Corsair.
