Server recommendations

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 10:44 -0700, Jason Etchason wrote:
> thanks for all the replies.
> 
> For the curious, the backend app is called WebSurvent provided by CfMC
> ( http://www.cfmc.com ).  The program is for collecting & processing
> data from online surveys.  Because the system can also tie into our
> data collection on the phone side, it's ideal to have the system in
> house, rather than getting hosting from the outside.
> 
> The hardware specs/cost estimates are not from a hardware supplier,
> but from the software supplier of the backend app we're going to be
> running.  I imagine they quoted high and could be using an outdated
> pricing guide.  I'm not sure how resource hungry the software is, but
> according to them a rig at spec given should peak at ~800 concurrent
> connections.  I'd guess that our max load will maybe hit 200
> conncurent to start, but it's really hard to say and I imagine usage
> will go up over time.
> 
> Here's a system from penguincomputing.com for ~ $3700
> 
> Relion 2600SA Server
> 2x Xeon 5130 2.0GHz
> 4GB DDR2-667 (4 x 1GB)
> 160GB /
> Software RAID -  (3) 160GB (hardware raid is additional $800)
> DVD-ROM
> Fedora Core 5
> 3-Year Warranty
> 
> 
> From previous comments it sounds like I would want to replace the
> Fedora install with CentOS, rather than upgrading to some enterprise
> sollution.  I'm hesitant on going with a sofware raid, but $800 for a
> controller seems steep to me.
> 
> Another question I have is SCSI vs SATA vs SAS.  I'm aware that scsi
> is performance/reliability over cost and sata is cost savings over
> performance.  I'm not familiar with SAS though.  How does compare?
----
I've not sounded off on this since so many have but...

- yes, I would agree that CentOS 4.4 (current) is the way to go.
- Software raid is preferred if using SATA drives...performance on
hardware based SATA Raid controllers with RAID 5 is poor.
- SCSI is performance + reliability.
- SATA is more megabytes but less performance and reliability
- I have yet to implement SAS so I can't relate any first hand knowledge
on this technology.
- 2.0 GHz Xeon? That seems a bit slow by today's standards.

There's no way to discern from your above information whether you are
talking about SATA or SCSI drives nor any way to infer whether the $800
for hardware RAID is a good choice.

Myself, I prefer SCSI drives w/ hardware RAID controllers - I typically
use Dell stuff and their OMSA / megamon does e-mail alerts and give
visual indicators of hardware problems and with hardware RAID, you
merely pull the bad drive, insert replacement drive and can rebuild the
RAID array live.

With software RAID, a failure will bring you down - at least that's my
understanding which is not entirely a bad thing - it depends upon your
definition of uptime requirements...if you absolutely need to stay
online 24/7 with no downtime, hardware RAID with hotswap SCSI
drives/backplane is the choice.

Craig