[PLUG] 1u server advice..

[Rogan Creswick]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Michael Ewan <mhewan1 at comcast.net> wrote:
> then you are going to have trouble getting 1TB of RAID 5 disk in the
> box, and please don't install it as RAID 0, you will really regret that
> decision when the array crashes and you need to restore 1TB from tape
> (your are planning on backing this up, right).  Hot swap is also good,
> but doesn't sound like a necessity in your case.

I'm actually not planning on using raid, and for backups, I intend to
rsync nightly to an off-site server (the amount of disk I'm planning
to put in there is largely so I can use multiple VMs w/out being
worried about space).  The vast majority of the content will be
duplicated, since the VMs will be largely identical, and I'll have
off-site backups of them in a pristine state, along with incremental
backups of the configuration details, data, and code running on them.

I also could probably manage perfectly well with about 100 gigs, but
disk is cheap :)  My current server is a shared penguin computing 1u,
and we were recently bitten by the raid/lvm configuration -- some
content was corrupted and mirrored across the raid before we noticed.
When we *did* notice, the system went down and would no longer boot.
We would have lost the (software) raid conf, if it weren't for an
off-site backup (or good memory... I wasn't actually involved in that
restoration).  In any case, I am not in a situation where that degree
of high-availability is worth the premium it costs--periodic backups
are sufficient to manage the times when something goes down.

Re: penguin computing -- I like the company, and the issues we've had
with our current penguin 1u are probably due to environmental problems
(poor cooling at the colo).  My only hesitation is that it looks like
the same hardware can be had from Dell for significantly less (there
is about a $400 difference between the Altus 650 and a similarly
configured PowerEdge SC1435 right now).

Since neither company offers an OS I am comfortable with, I'll be
reinstalling on my own anyway. (And probably buying the disk(s) from
newegg, to save another couple hundred.)  I would sleep better buying
from penguin computing though :)

> You will want dual power supplies, both for capacity and for
> redundancy.  Another reason not to do this yourself, the vendor has
> already done all the power consumption calculations for ALL the possible
> configurations.

Very good point...

--Rogan