Quanta Help CloudFlare Shifts to Build New Servers

CloudFlare announced cooperation with Taiwanese company Quanta to build custom designed servers G4. End Quote

(1888PressRelease) July 24, 2013 - Content delivery and security specialist CloudFlare have been growing rapidly as it built out a global network of data centers. The company has been working with HP to build its G3 servers, but with its latest hardware refresh G4 has chosen Quanta, which has built servers for Facebook and Rackspace, for customized servers.

OEM Matthew Prince provided an in-depth overview of CloudFlare's hardware development in a blog post, reviewing its existing G3 servers and some of the way it has fine-tuned its G4 model to boost performance. The updates feature Intel SSD drives and SandyBridge Xeon 2630L processors, adjustments to cache, and a shift in network cards.

"The biggest change from our G3 to G4 servers was the jump from 1Gpbs to 10Gbps network interfaces. With our G3 servers, we would sometimes max out the 6Gbps of network capacity per serve when under certain high-volume layer 7 attacks. We know we want to jump to 10Gbps on each service, but we also wanted to pick the right network controller card." Prince writes.

This company has tested a very wide range of network cards, spent more time optimizing this component in the servers before settling on the network cards from a company called Solarflare.

"Solarflare has traditionally focused on supplying extremely performance network cards for the high frequency trading industry. What we found was that their cards ran circles around everything else in the market: handling up to 16 million packets per second in our tests (at 60 bytes per packet, the typical size of a SYN packet in a SYN-flood attack), compared with the next best alternative topping out around 9M PPS. We ended up using the Solarflare SFC9020 in our G4 servers."

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