Physical Servers

CTS recommends that researchers host new servers in Drexel's University Research Compute Facility (URCF). CTS is no longer adding new servers to our Main 005 server room -- any research groups currently running servers there should make plans to migrate to the URCF.

Server Requirements

All new server purchases should be rack mountable in standard 19" server racks. Unless the servers are being purchased purely as compute nodes, we recommend that the servers be equipped with redundant power supplies, ECC RAM, server-grade RAID cards, and enterprise-grade hard drives.

Networking Requirements

All new servers are being connected via Drexel's private RFC1918 address space, with addresses assigned starting with 10.248.x.x. These addresses are able to communicate freely across Drexel's network, but are not accessible to the outside world. This greatly reduces the ability for attackers to scan devices for vulnerabilities, and take a lot of guess work out of firewall configuration (not that it isn't still important).