Re: Opinion: Dell PwrEdge/Xeon/RH 8.0 server

[Andrew Williams <andrew williams sourcefire com>]

On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 16:03, Bill wrote:
> Just got directed to get a new server that will serve about 200
> clients with occasional web requirements, nothing intensive.
> Planning for future growth, though, so I looked at a Dell PowerEdge 4600
> with Intel Xeon 3.06GHz, 2GB DDR/SDRAM, three 36GB SCSI drives,
> RH 8.0 Professional.  Controller is a PERC3-DC card, 1 internal,
> 1 external channel.
> 

Depending on what your clients are doing that may or may not be enough. 
I have a dual 2.4 ghz xeon on my desk and it screams (io is a bit slow,
but it's an IDE drive and I'm running ext3 so I'm not terribly
surprised)


> Anyone running something like this?  Opinions?  Gotcha's?  What
> about RAID 0,1,5?  
> 

I would go with raid 5. Or, if you can afford a 4th disk going RAID 0+1
(giving you a striped mirror ~70G of useable space)  A raid 5 with the 3
disks will also give you ~70G of useable space.  The advantages of 0+1
over raid 5 are that you can sustain two disks crashing (instead of one)
and r/w performance will be better.  The downside is that you need 4
disks instead of 3.  If your write load isn't going to be that high the
performance gain with 0+1 will be negligable.  This is all generalities,
I don't know a thing about the PERC controller or the disks you're going
to be using.

I would make sure you have the thing adequately cooled. 

> Thanks,
> Bill
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
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