Scalable internet engine

摘要

A scalable Internet engine is comprised of a large number of commercially available server boards each arranged as an engine blade in a power and space efficient cabinet. The engine blades are removably positioned in a front side of the cabinet in a vertical orientation. A through-plane in the middle of a chassis assembly within the cabinet provides common power and control peripheral signals to all engine blades. I/O signals for each engine blade are routed through apertures in the through-plane to interface cards positioned in the rear of the cabinet. The scalable engine can accommodate different types of server boards in the same chassis assembly because of a common blade carrier structure. Different types of commercially available motherboards are mounted in the common blade carrier structure that provides a uniform mechanical interface to the chassis assembly. A specially designed PCI host board that can plug into various types of motherboards has a first connector for connecting to the through plane and second connector for connecting to the interface cards. Redundant hot-swappable high-efficiency power supplies are connected to the common power signals on the through plane. The host board includes circuitry that distributes the power signals to the server board for that engine blade by emulating the ATX power management protocol. Replaceable fan trays are mounted below the engine blades to cool the engine. Preferably, the cabinet accommodates multiple rows of engine blades each in a sub-chassis that are stacked on top of each other, as well as rack mounted networks switches and disk drives.