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excellent and very useful report Nick, much appreciated,<BR>
I'd say that budget is probably on the $3-4ks,<BR>
that fail-over is important, <BR>
(probably lesser hardware performing as backup and mirror DB would do)<BR>
the bottle neck would probably be on MySQL,<BR>
some complex dashboard pages need to run about 50+ queries before they are served,<BR>
so focusing on HD i/o speed might be crucial, <BR>
I've been super happy with linux soft raid, I don't see why not using it,<BR>
and every time i had to use some <BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>
<PRE>
Well, among the options there's the OEM route and the custom route.
Depending on budget, you could do something like an HP DL380G5 for
about $5,000.00 to $6,000.00 on the high end, though depending on disk
requirements the cost might change. A fully loaded HP MSA70 SAS array
of 25 drives costs about $10,000.00 but it sounds like you wouldn't
need that much disk, just the server.
Dell has some servers in the $3,800+ range that might do the job, for
example;
PowerEdge Energy Smart 2950 III
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® L5240, 6MB Cache, 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB, ES
Additional Processor
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® L5240, 6MB Cache, 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB
Memory 8GB 667MHz (4x2GB), Dual Ranked DIMMs, Energy Smart
Sun Microsystems has some decent servers at about $4,000.00 to $5,000
that support 4 drives (for RAID-5 or RAID-10)
<A HREF="http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4200/">http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4200/</A>
As for the custom route, in my experience PC Power and Cooling makes
some nice PSU's. I've had good luck with some lower-end server
motherboards at Newegg, such as the Tyan S2925A2NRF;
uptime
13:03:47 up 18 days, 14:12, 4 users, load average: 1.21, 1.22, 1.19
but I think they no longer sell that board and for a system supporting
100 users, more CPU's/cores, more RAM, and faster disk (SAS or U320
SCSI) might be nice. Hard to say without knowing the memory
utilization of the web application in question under the type of load
you are seeing (100 users). There are a number of server boards to
choose from which are well-reviewed;
SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DWA-N Dual LGA 771 Intel 5400 Extended ATX Server
Motherboard - Retail
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182130">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182130</A>
But, building a system from parts and finding a case to fit an EATX
board like that is less appealing to me nowadays. I'd rather just
purchase a barebones system or a box that I can unpack, rack, install
and be up and running. My patience for fooling with hardware in the
work environment has lessened.
Supermicro makes some nice affordable barebones server systems (and so
does Tyan);
SUPERMICRO SYS-6015B-TB 1U Barebone Server Intel 5000P Dual LGA 771
Dual Intel Xeon 1333/1066MHz FSB
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16816101133">http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16816101133</A>
SUPERMICRO SYS-6025W-NTR+B 2U Barebone Server Intel 5400 Dual LGA 771
Dual Intel Xeon 1600/1333/1066MHz FSB
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16816101180">http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16816101180</A>
I used a Tyan GT20 1U (barebones) server at my last job and it was
absolutely bulletproof hardware, but the load was nothing like 100
users on a web application.
I've had good luck with software RAID, both with RAID-1 and RAID-5
under Linux, but you could use a 3ware or Adaptec controller for
hardware RAID with a Supermicro server.
If the server is mission critical (production) and intended to support
100 users, I would think that the aim would be availability and to
avoid downtime as that might be a significant problem for a multi-user
system intended to serve/support 100 users. So, a clear argument could
be made to purchase an OEM (Dell, HP, IBM, Sun ,etc.) server with same-
day on-site hardware support, or have some spare parts on hand
(purchase two less-expensive identical servers and use one as a
development server/backup). At my day job we have six of the HP DL380
G5 servers, each with an attached MSA 70 array. Recently two of the
servers blew SAS drives (three SAS drive failures in total). Repair
was as simple as using the HP Array Configuration CLI to confirm the
drives were failed (as the drive LED's indicated), HP shipped
replacement drives the next day and I just popped them in and the
servers were running all the while (RAID-6 configuration). The
hpacucli exists for Linux;
<A HREF="http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=1121516&prodNameId=3288134&swEnvOID=4035&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-80a59132d68a442288a48e2634">http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=1121516&prodNameId=3288134&swEnvOID=4035&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-80a59132d68a442288a48e2634</A>
and under that type of hardware RAID (HP Smart Array Controller),
dealing with disk failures ought to be as easy as pulling failed
drives and inserting new ones (i.e. hardly any work/effort at all, and
a good degree of redundancy, i.e. RAID-6). I will confess to liking
the hardware in these HP systems quite a bit (despite the fact that
they run Windows), but they are $5,000.00 to $6,000.00 servers and
with the arrays each server is more like a $15,000.00 to $16,000.00
system. I think one can do just as well (performance-wise) for a lot
less money.
I think for the server you describe, I would use a minimum of 8 GB of
RAM and consumption will depend on a number of variables, such as if
you use Apache 1.3.x or 2.x with loadable modules, and I have no idea
what the resource requirements for the web application you mention
would be. For the system you propose, I would vote for fast disk I/O
such as SAS or U320 SCSI with 10K RPM or 15K RPM drives; probably SAS
is your best bet. Disks will fail no matter what and as such I'd
suggest hardware or software RAID, having spares on hand or quickly
available (overnight shipping).
We primarily use Sun servers at $day_job, and with a few exceptions,
for the most part I like the Sun hardware. At another previous job
they have a number of Supermicro servers, some of which have been
running reliably for 4+ years (but having a hot spare server is a good
idea if the system is a production system supporting a large number
of users...i.e. 100 users).
At the moment I'm testing an 8-way SunFire X2200 with 8 GB of RAM
(running Rosetta@home) the testbed OS is Fedora Core 10 (x86_64) and
the machine is doing fine (only two drives in RAID-1 though, and so
not suitable I would think for your proposed 100 user system). We've
have some trouble with this particular system, but in general the Sun
servers have been great (some running Solaris, some running Linux) and
perform well. Having a company with spare parts and Field Engineers
behind the product is nice for production systems.
top - 06:59:22 up 21:34, 3 users, load average: 8.18, 8.17, 8.17
Tasks: 250 total, 10 running, 238 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie
Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 1.3%sy, 98.7%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 6.0%us, 1.0%sy, 93.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy,100.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 0.0%us, 3.3%sy, 96.7%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu4 : 2.3%us, 1.0%sy, 96.7%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu5 : 0.0%us, 1.0%sy, 99.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu6 : 1.7%us, 0.3%sy, 98.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu7 : 0.0%us, 0.3%sy, 99.7%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi,
0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8197460k total, 3878332k used, 4319128k free, 176892k buffers
Swap: 41945592k total, 0k used, 41945592k free, 1049976k cached
-Nick
----------------------------------------
Nicholas S. Frost
7 Avenida Vista Grande #325
Santa Fe, NM 87508
<A HREF="mailto:nickf@nickorama.com">nickf@nickorama.com</A>
----------------------------------------
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</PRE>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
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