Server Tour: Opening it up

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Jarrod Spiga21 February 2009, 4:15 PM

Opening up the server

Once the lid has been removed, you can see the internals of the server. Redundant fans adorn the front of the chassis, with storage controllers and CPU’s immediately behind. Redundant power supplies, a PCIe Riser cage and RAM can also be clearly seen. Note that every component is oriented to optimise airflow.

A close-up of the front section of the server. Between the fans and CPU heatsinks, you can see air
baffles, designed to maximise airflow from the fans and through the heatsinks.

Towards the top, another air baffle is installed to optimise air flow over the SAS controller and through to the power supplies. The hole in this air baffle is required in order to reveal the metal riser that the server lid latch clips on to.

After the baffle has been removed, we can see the SmartArray P400 SAS controller that is installed in this server. The SAS two cables are connected to the backplane that the SAS hard disk drives connect to. You can also see the cache board, featuring 256MB of memory. The cable plugged in to the cache board leads to the battery that preserves cache content in the event of a power cut.

Black plastic clips retain the controller on the main board. The PCIe slot that the controller card
plugs into can be seen just under the card itself.