[K12OSN] Server sizing in the real world

[Eric Harrison]

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Terrell [ISO-8859-1] Prudé, Jr. wrote:
<snip>
> Twin AMD Athlon 1.47GHz chips
> 4GB DRAM
> Two 80GB parallel IDE disk drives (started with just one)
> Gig-E fiber NIC
>
> You'll notice that I used parallel IDE disk drives, while Petre
> recommends SCSI disks.  He's right; SCSI is certainly better than any
> form of ATA.  However, it does cost more to implement.  When the above
> server was built, we were in a tight-budget situation and thus went with
> parallel IDE so that we could build the server at all (I just flat
> refused to do it without 4GB DRAM).  The server not only served 25 LTSP
> terminals, but also acted as a major "Windows" file server for the
> school, thanks to Samba.  It handled everything thrown at it with
> aplomb.
<snip>

We just ordered a "bulk storage" server, but beefed it up just a tad
so that we can evaluate new technology for future deployments (and if
it works really well, we'll consolidate several other servers on it).

I spec'd it with SATA drives & a LSI Megaraid SATA 300-8x controller.
The benchmarks I've seen says this card rocks, right up there with
SCSI. We shall see! (you can get a 300-8x for about $450, a bit pricey
but cheaper than a single 300G SCSI drive).

Here's the whole package we're going to play with:

 	dual dual-core AMD Opteron 265's (yum, four processors!) (~1,400)
 	4 gig ram (ECC registered)                               (  ~800)
 	LSI Megaraid SATA 300-8x controller                      (  ~450)
 	6 Hitachi 400G SATA drives (2TB in RAID5)                (~1,600)
     Tyan motherboard w/2 GigE ports                          (  ~450)
     3U rack case with 12 hot-swap drive bays @ dual power    (  ~800)

If the disk sub-system performs as well as hoped, this would make an
ok K12LTSP server ;-)

-Eric