Electricity: electrical systems and devices – Housing or mounting assemblies with diverse electrical... – For electronic systems and devices
Reexamination Certificate
2000-11-10
2002-09-17
Gandhi, Jayprakash N. (Department: 2841)
Electricity: electrical systems and devices
Housing or mounting assemblies with diverse electrical...
For electronic systems and devices
C361S724000, C361S730000, C361S752000, C361S753000, C361S797000, C439S061000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06452809
ABSTRACT:
RELATED APPLICATION
The present invention is related to a co-pending application filed concurrently herewith and entitled “Method and System For Providing Dynamic Hosted Service Management Across Disparate Accounts/Sites,” a copy of which is attached hereto and the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to the field of computer processing systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a scalable server engine comprised of a large number of commercially available server boards each arranged as an engine blade in a power and space efficient chassis.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The explosive growth of the Internet has been driven to a large extent by the emergence of commercial service providers and hosting facilities, such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Application Service Providers (ASPs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Enterprise Solution Providers (ESPs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and the like. Although there is no clear definition of the precise set of services provided by each of these businesses, generally these service providers and hosting facilities provide services tailored to meet some, most or all of a customer's needs with respect to application hosting, site development, e-commerce management and server deployment in exchange for payment of setup charges and periodic fees. In the context of server deployment, for example, the fees are customarily based on the particular hardware and software configurations that a customer will specify for hosting the customer's application or website. For purposes of this invention, the term “hosted services” is intended to encompass the various types of these services provided by this spectrum of service providers and hosting facilities. For convenience, this group of service providers and hosting facilities shall be referred to collectively as Hosted Service Providers (HSPs).
Commercial HSPs provide users with access to hosted applications on the Internet in the same way that telephone companies provide customers with connections to their intended caller through the international telephone network. The computer equipment that HSPs use to host the applications and services they provide is commonly referred to as a server. In its simplest form, a server can be a personal computer that is connected to the Internet through a network interface and that runs specific software designed to service the requests made by customers or clients of that server. For all of the various delivery models that can be used by HSPs to provide hosted services, most HSPs will use a collection of servers that are connected to an internal network in what is commonly referred to as a “server farm”, with each server performing unique tasks or the group of servers sharing the load of multiple tasks, such as mail server, web server, access server, accounting and management server. In the context of hosting websites, for example, customers with smaller websites are often aggregated onto and supported by a single web server. Larger websites, however, are commonly hosted on dedicated web servers that provide services solely for that site. For general background on the Internet and HSPs, refer to Geoff Huston,
ISP Survival Guide: Strategies For Running A Competitive ISP,
(1999).
As the demand for Internet services has increased, there has been a need for ever-larger capacity to meet this demand. One solution has been to utilize more powerful computer systems as servers. Large mainframe and midsize computer systems have been used as servers to service large websites and corporate networks. Most HSPs tend not to utilize these larger computer systems because of the expense, complexity, and lack of flexibility of such systems. Instead, HSPs have preferred to utilize server farms consisting of large numbers of individual personal computer servers wired to a common Internet connection or bank of modems and sometimes accessing a common set of disk drives. When an HSP adds a new hosted service customer, for example, one or more personal computer servers are manually added to the HSP server farm and loaded with the appropriate software and data (e.g., web content) for that customer. In this way, the HSP deploys only that level of hardware required to support its current customer level. Equally as important, the HSP can charge its customers an upfront setup fee that covers a significant portion of the cost of this hardware. By utilizing this approach, the HSP does not have to spend money in advance for large computer systems with idle capacity that will not generate immediate revenue for the HSP. The server farm solution also affords an easier solution to the problem of maintaining security and data integrity across different customers than if those customers were all being serviced from a single larger mainframe computer. If all of the servers for a customer are loaded only with the software for that customer and are connected only to the data for that customer, security of that customer's information is insured by physical isolation.
Up to now, there have been two approaches with respect to the way in which HSPs built their server farms. One approach is to use a homogenous group of personal computer systems (hardware and software) supplied from a single manufacturer. The other approach is to use personal computer systems supplied from a number of different manufacturers. The homogeneous approach affords the HSP advantages in terms of only having to support a single server platform, but at the same time it restricts the HSP to this single server platform. The heterogeneous approach using systems supplied from different manufacturers is more flexible and affords the HSP the advantage of utilizing the most appropriate server hardware and software platform for a given customer or task, but this flexibility comes at the cost of increased complexity and support challenges associated with maintaining multiple server platforms.
As HSPs increased their capacity, the number of servers in their computer room or data center also increased. To conserve on floor space in the computer room or data center, an HSP would install rack mounted cabinets to allow multiple servers to be stacked together on the same amount of floor space. Individual personal computer servers could then be stacked either vertically or horizontally in these rack mounted cabinets together with switching equipment and modems. As a further improvement on the conventional power packaging enclosure of a typical personal computer server, servers have been developed specifically for rack mounting in what are referred to as “pizza box” or “U” formats where each server slides horizontally into one or more slots in a rack mounted cabinet. Examples of homogeneous servers packaged in this type of a rack mounted configuration include the RaQ server line from Cobalt Network Systems, the Netfinity server line from IBM and the A-class server line from Hewlett-Packard.
Although rack mounted servers offer a considerable improvement in terms of space efficiency as compared to conventional tower cabinet personal computer servers, installing or adding new rack mounted servers to a server farm continues to be a manual operation involving significant amounts of cabling and wire connection, as well as software and network configuration. In addition, because the rack-mounted server is designed as an independent computer system, each server is provided with its own power supply. In order to keep the overall cost of the servers reasonable, these individual power supplies are inexpensive and therefore relatively inefficient. As a result, a server farm consisting of several rack-mounted servers consumes a large amount of electricity and dissipates a large quantity of waste heat. This problem is particularly acute in the thinnest 1U form factor that would allow for the greatest number of servers to be stacked on top of each other. Because each of the 1U servers is positioned horizontally in the rack cabinet, air
Chen Steve S.
Jackson Russell A.
Smith Philip S.
Galactic Computing Corporation
Gandhi Jayprakash N.
Patterson Thuente Skaar & Christensen P.A.
LandOfFree
Scalable internet engine does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Scalable internet engine, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Scalable internet engine will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-2835024