[Hcoop-discuss] Server pricing

[Justin S. Leitgeb]

Sure, if we're OK with poor performance, it can be done relatively 
cheaply.  I'm guessing we'd just want a fairly large case (perhaps a 
Dell 2850 or bigger, a 2850 can hold 6 disks), a SATA RAID controller 
and a bunch of disks in RAID 5 (maybe some of the new 500 GB disks).  We 
could start with 4 disks (3 live and a hot spare) and it should be 
pretty reliable.  Maybe around $2500 or so to start?

Sorry I wasn't on-board with this earlier, I guess I just didn't 
understand our (flexible) performance constraints.

Justin


Adam Chlipala wrote:

>Justin S. Leitgeb wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I guess I'm having trouble answering the question because I think it 
>>depends on the type of file that is shared.  Surely we are going to 
>>approach resolv.conf differently than html pages, right?  What files do 
>>you think should have a global namespace, and how are these going to 
>>play into the rest of our system architecture?
>> 
>>
>>    
>>
>In my current vision, there are two kinds of files in the shared filesystem:
>
>1) Files whose primary logical location is in the shared filesystem.  
>This includes HTML pages.
>2) Files whose primary logical location is on a local filesystem, but 
>that we periodically synchronize to the shared filesystem for ease of 
>centralized back-ups.  This includes resolv.conf.
>
>  
>
>>We could buy a scaleable system like you're suggesting above, but:
>>
>>1) It would be expensive.
>>2) It's not necessary right now, in terms of space.
>>3) We would outgrow it at some point and need to buy a completely new server
>> 
>>
>>    
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>I think it's entirely clear that we have current and future members who 
>would love to be able to use arbitrarily much disk space.  Keep in mind 
>that many of us now are purposely avoiding using HCoop for purposes that 
>would incur significant disk usage; it's not that we're all only 
>interested in low disk usage services, but rather that we impose low 
>disk quotas ATM.  Can you elaborate on your point 2 in light of this?
>
>Can it really be that expensive to have a slow fileserver for which it's 
>relatively easy to add new disks?  I'm fine with bad performance as long 
>as we can get commercial-level reliability and protection against data loss.
>
>  
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>>If we are really just talking about a shared namespace for the 
>>user-level files, perhaps we can do the following:  make the public web 
>>server be both an AFS server and client.  Then, just plan on adding a 
>>separate fileserver later to join the AFS cell.
>>
>>Since you know AFS better than I do, do you think this would be possible?
>> 
>>
>>    
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>I don't know very much about AFS.  I only used it a lot and heard in 
>operating systems class that it has significant technical advantage over 
>NFS.
>
>  
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>>Certainly, it's not for something like what we're doing with apache 
>>right now.  But it would work for sendmail, DNS, hosts files, ntp...  
>>Basically, while we have specialized needs for some services, there is a 
>>lot that is "centralized", or at least able to be controlled by a small 
>>group of admins in our network.  It seems to me that in those places of 
>>our environment we could benefit from something like cfengine, eventually.
>> 
>>
>>    
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>DNS and Exim (no sendmail for us!) are also member-controlled for us, 
>but at semantically shallower levels than Apache configuration.  I agree 
>that admin tools like you're suggesting could be very helpful, though.
>
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