[K12OSN] New Building's LTSP Server

[Julius Szelagiewicz]

On Thu, 5 May 2011, Jeff Siddall wrote:

> On 05/05/2011 03:17 PM, Julius Szelagiewicz wrote:
> > 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 ...
>
> An Intel Core i7 2600 is about 10X the speed of a Xeon 3.2 and is $310
> 12 GB Corsair DDR3 is $140
> An OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB SSD is $220
>
> Definitely not multiple thousands of dollars but still 10X the CPU
> performance, 3X the RAM, and a much faster disk.
>
> Want more reliability and double the disk read throughput?  Add a
> redundant disk with software RAID1.  That will easily outperform the 6
> disk SCSI3 array.
>
> Want 10X the networking performance?  Add a 10 GBaseT NIC for about $500.
>
> Agreed about no ECC and no redundant power but honestly those have never
> been big issues for me.  After all, LTSP is all about serving desktops
> so desktop reliability doesn't seem so out of line.
>
Jeff, your point is well taken, but as I said, YMMV. It's been my
experience that servers do a better job serving. ECC memory makes a huge
difference - I never had a server sudden stop due to a transient memory
error, it did happen to  many desktop systems. I have yet to experience a
bad failure of SCSI disk array. Software RAID? Not that good. And
honestly, my Atom based netbook is really not a very good server, despite
8GB memory.

Oh, I forgot - the 10GB switches arte not yet commodities.

julius