New cdbuilder server improves Debian infrastructure

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Debian Project                                http://www.debian.org/
New cdbuilder server improves Debian infrastructure     press <at> debian.org
March 3rd, 2010                 http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100316
------------------------------------------------------------------------

New cdbuilder server improves Debian infrastructure

Today, the Debian project administrators are activating a new cdbuilder
server. The server computes the official Debian ISO images once all
software packages are ready for a new Debian release. While the old
system needed 20 hours to build the ISOs, the new server needs less than
two hours for the same job.

Debian users download ISO images and burn them on CD or DVD to create
their Debian installation media. "Building ISO images in a fast way is a
critical task for every Debian release. Once all the packages are ready,
everyone is waiting for the new ISO images to become available. With
over 25.000 packages for twelve computer architectures this is a very
challenging task." says Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader.

Debian's new SC846 server from Thomas Krenn utilizes two Intel® Xeon®
Processors E5540 to compute the ISO images, which get written to an
high-performance RAID array. The array uses 24 Toshiba 15k SAS disks,
connected to an Adaptec ASR5445Z controller. After the ISO images have
been created, they are copied to multiple mirror servers where they can
be downloaded by Debian users. "On the old system, we would expect to
take roughly 20 hours for a full build for all architectures. The new
system is much more powerful and will allow us to do much more work in
parallel, reducing that time to less than 2 hours. That will make a huge