1 fileserver for 4500+ users?

Timmah

Weaksauce
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Oct 15, 2003
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So the University I work at has a "long term" plan to eventually go from between 7-10 fileservers to ONE. Yes, just one for approximately 4500 faculty. I for one think this is insane but then again I am not the one making the decisions. basically, tell me what you think.
 
i support about 500 users on a 2k3 File server and still think that is alot for one server to be handling.
9x that is just crazy, that's way too many eggs in one basket.

Maybe they mis-worded it, and it's actually 1 SAN being installed, accessable by all the servers? That would make more sense.
 
How much activity? Or, how many simultaneous users?

I know many places which have a single fileserver for 1500 - 2000 users, and they don't have a single problem.
 
I'm 99% sure it's just 1 server, not a SAN or anything like that. I couldn't tell you how much activity there is on our network but the impression is alot. doing desktop support work here...most people just have their my documents folder pointing to G: or H: or whatever...noone stores anything local....we have people with 2 gig .pst files out there...on the network. they are thinking of putting quotas in place...but stuck on decidiing how much to give. I still think it's nuts.
 
My guess is that it's a cluster of some sort. Will appear as one object but actually it will have fault tolerance, multiprocessors and storage units. I highly doubt they would even consider putting that many users on one box. It would go well beyond insane, dumb, whatever you want to call it.
 
You can raid, have 8 CPUs, and all the ram you want, but you still have bottlenecks.

I think it is a dumb idea.
 
Give Sun or IBM a call, they'll hook you up with some nice RISC/UNIX machines that will do the job.
 
Who knows. I truly don't know what they're up to. I know we did just get a decent sized IBM cluster for Research Computing...IBM p655 (i think multiples of them, 2 or 3 maybe?)(not sure of the cost of that bad boy) but it's taking up a lot of space. Something about the Linux on P series program. I'll have to inquire more. I agree they are nuts though with the single server thing.
 
It can be done, if users have the patience. We have 600 users no problem on an old Netware 5 server, so with top end hardware and a great NOS (some *nix, I'd assume) and GigE, I guess it would be possible.

I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the one responsible, but I wouldn't say that it is impossible.
 
Originally posted by TrueBuckeye
It can be done, if users have the patience. We have 600 users no problem on an old Netware 5 server, so with top end hardware and a great NOS (some *nix, I'd assume) and GigE, I guess it would be possible.

I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the one responsible, but I wouldn't say that it is impossible.

You might just aswell do snail mail ;) Man it will be slowwwwww.
 
How well do those large servers with 512 processors and 512gigs of Ram stack up for 4500+ users?

Doesn't Ebay use 1 or two of those huge multiprocessor machines?
 
lol


yeah i bet that the school/college doesnt have the budget of ebay tho.....and if they do...well hot damn I am going there!
 
I've got around 1200 users on a fileserver w/ half a gig of RAM and just 1 CPU (Pentium II), and no slowness issues. It really depends what you're using the server for. For general purpose use at a University (that's my environment) 4500+ users on one modern server may not be that big of a deal. It partly depends on the OS -- NetWare seems to scale out well, while apparently some other OSes don't.

Typical usage patterns in my environment involve lots of logins staggered throughout the morning, login scripts are obviously transfered, and then lots of mostly small files are opened by users. Throughout the day there is a slow stream of closing and opening small files. So, while there are lots of "active" concurrent connections, the clients are mostly idle through the day. Obviously multimedia shops would see a completely different usage pattern...

Do you have any idea how many concurrent users they are expecting? It's entirely possible to have 4500 accounts, but only a few hundred active at any given time. Or is 4500 the expected number of concurrent users, with the total number of accounts being much higher?
 
Originally posted by WS6
How well do those large servers with 512 processors and 512gigs of Ram stack up for 4500+ users?

Doesn't Ebay use 1 or two of those huge multiprocessor machines?

I worked on an HP Alpha GS320. It has 32 CPU's and it runs you about 1.5 Million dollars... now they do make a HP Alpha GS1280 (64 CPU's) and the SC45 (4,096 CPUs :eek: :eek: :eek: ).... but that is in the millions.


So no college can afford that unless if they got some black visas ;)
 
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