In June 2008, just a couple of months before the 2^nd birthday of the BC Clan, management was considering the possibility of renting a second dedicated server for hosting clan game servers. As we considered our options, it became clear that it could be much more cost effective to purchase equipment and co-locate it in a datacenter than to rent someone else's equipment. At that time we decided move to a point where we no longer rented dedicated servers. We purchased servers through a special fund raiser and with money the clan had been saving for this type of purpose. Generous donations of members and friends of BC Clan have made this idea a reality. BC Clan currently owns 3 servers.;;

Server 1 and Server 2

Game Server1 and Game Server2 are our current game servers, they were both purchased at the same time and have almost identical specs (different drives). Both of these servers are well built and are true server level platforms (except for the non-Xeon Processors). Our own testing has shown us that Xeon's do not provide any performance gain for hosting game servers over the equivalent Intel desktop CPU in a single socket system. A true hardware caching RAID card was employed due to Counter Strike:Source, Crysis and other future games' dependence on disk speed. The drives are running RAID1.

Game Server1 Specifications

CPU : Intel Core 2 Quad Core 2.66GHz 12MB cache, 1333MHz FSB (Q9450)

RAM : 4GB Kingston DDR2 800MHz ECC

Server1 --> Storage : Two Seagate Barracuda 500GB ES.2 Drives (7200rpm, 32MB Cache)

Server2 --> Storage : Two Seagate Barracuda 640GB AS Drives (7200rpm, 32MB Cache)

RAID : Highpoint 128MB Caching Controller (Rocket RAID 3120)

Power Supply : Asus 200W High efficiency Power Supply

Motherboard / Chassis : Asus Barebone RS100-E5 (Intel 3200 Chipset, 1U)

Network : Dual Gigabit NICs

Optical Drive : Dual Layer DVD Burner

Operating System : Microsoft Windows 2008 Server 64bit

Server 3 (In Construction)

Game Server3 is being built with a different plan of trying to purchase the most cost effective game server possible while employing higher speed desktop parts such as gaming RAM. Server3 will employ a Quad core Athlon and use onboard RAID to host games that are not disk speed dependent (such as Halo). We expect Server3 to cost 65% of what our other game servers did and be almost as fast as them in CPU/Memory related tasks after some mild overclocking. We hope to have Server3 live by late January or early February 2009.

Server3 Specifications (Under development)

CPU : AMD Opteron 1354 (Quad core 2.2GHz 75W )

RAM : 4GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 1066MHz

Storage : Two Seagate Barracuda 500GB ES.2 Drives (7200rpm, 32MB Cache)

RAID : ATI 780 Onboard

Power Supply : Super Micro 260W High efficiency Power Supply

Motherboard : GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2HP (ATI 780G Chipset)

Chassis : Supermicro CSE-512L-260B (1U)

Operating System : Microsoft Windows 2008 Server 64bit

Web Server

Our original intent was to purchase separate hardware to use as a webserver, however this proved to not be cost effective after hosting costs. Instead, we are setting up an Ubuntu 64bit virtual machine on Server2 using Hyper-V to use as our web server. We only plan to dedicated 512MB of RAM and 80GB of drive space, but this should be more than adequate for our use. We hope to have this live in March 2009.

All of our servers have two network cards in them. One network port is connected to the internet, the other is connected to the BC LAN to allow the servers to run nightly back-ups to each other. The BC LAN is secured on a seperate VLAN on our clan switch.

Switch

Our servers are all interconnected with each other through a Dell PowerConnect 2724 Gigabit Switch. Each server has two connections to this switch, one to a VLAN with internet access for our publicly accessible game servers and website, and the other to a private VLAN to allow the servers to back each other up and provide a second method of communication with each machine.

Donations towards these servers.

We would like to thank the following people for donating towards these server and making it possible for us all to play on. We will remember their donation on this page.