[K12OSN] New Building's LTSP Server

[Julius Szelagiewicz]

On Thu, 5 May 2011, Jeff Siddall wrote:

> On 05/05/2011 12:27 PM, Julius Szelagiewicz wrote:
> > Joe, you are mistaken. I'm about to build some fax servers (don't ask) and
> > I'm looking at $199.00 servers. For example:
> > http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=DL380-XEON3200X2-4R&cat=SVR
> >
> > There's a lot of good cheap hardware out there. If I were to make one of
> > those baies into an LTSP server, I'd add a SATA controller and external
> > SATA drives. YMMV.
>
> I would say there is a lot of cheap hardware out there but I would argue
> it is not good.
>
> That $199 server has CPUs that perform about the same as an Atom 330 so
> using that is like deploying an LTSP server on a netbook!
>
> A decent _new_ desktop system has more than 10X the performance, more
> than 10X the storage and likely 4X the RAM of that server.  Getting a
> server that can keep up with that performance will cost $$$ thousands.

I'd say you are overly optimistic on the capabilities of Atom processors.
The $199.00 server has 2 3.2GHz Xeons and 4GB ram. It also has excellent
HP smartArray controller and 6 SCSI drives and 2 1GB server class NICs. I
can see how you can get 10 times the performance in a desktop system, but
it seems to run into multiple thousands of dollars, without ECC memory,
without redundant power supplies, without good array controllers, without
SCSI drives ...

I'd look for a refurb 4 processor server, either Xeon or AMD 64bit, put
12GB ECC memory in it, add SATA controller and drives for big slower
storage and let her rip. Desktop systems are just that, desktop. Servers
behave better under load and tend to last better. My $0.02

Julius