Design a Server - can this handle the load?

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Ruffy

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 31, 2001
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Alright we're talking mid to fairly cheap servers. Something I havent delt with much

Specs
CPU : Opteron 146
Mobo : Tyan K8E Nforce4 Ultra
RAM : 2GB PQI DDR 3200 (Non ECC)
HD's : 2x Western Digital 320GB SATA 1Million MTBF Drive's, not set up for RAID
Floppy/DVDRom/4U Rackmount.

Now My concern is the I/O Performance and reliability. We already have a dedicated backup server. Which means this server will be running Windows 2003 SBS, Set up with Active Directory, dns, file server, possibly dhcp, possibly exchange.
The user load will be 9-11 People. With very little chance of future expansion. This is a small concrete company and already that's alot of people for this type of business.

Now the company's files consist mostly of word and excel documents(About 180mbs of them) And a Quickbooks database file (*.qdb) That is 200mbs. What would be the best way to handle this? Could the machines I/O up above handle this load well?

How would you set it up? I was thinking store all user files on Drive 2, Partition Drive 1 into OS and backup partitions. nightly have drive 2 copied to drive 1's backup partition. On top of that Backup server would be doing nightly backups as well to tape and multiple drives.

SCSI is out of the question. Too expensive. We have a 2940uw scsi card and dual 18gb seagate 10krpm drives in the backup server. I "Could" put them in the new server but doubt they'd perform well.
 
Honestly that's probably overkill for that little amount of data and userbase. I think you could get away with much less, but for the sake of future-proofing I would say that system is a safe bet.

The way you describe setting it up is OK, although I might recommend doing raid 1 for reliability sake. That way if one drive(say the drive with the OS on it) dies, you don't need install the OS all over again. What you're describing is pretty much like raid 1 minus the OS. I say screw it and just go with raid 1.

-Matt
 
Matt126 said:
Honestly that's probably overkill for that little amount of data and userbase. I think you could get away with much less, but for the sake of future-proofing I would say that system is a safe bet.

The way you describe setting it up is OK, although I might recommend doing raid 1 for reliability sake. That way if one drive(say the drive with the OS on it) dies, you don't need install the OS all over again. What you're describing is pretty much like raid 1 minus the OS. I say screw it and just go with raid 1.

-Matt
Click to expand...

two file systems on two drives are better than one :)
If it was up to me i'd setup a raid 5 array then mirror that.

the reason I planned on the way i said is to ahve data in multiple locations since I can't trust these ppl to rotate tapes
 
Ruffy said:
two file systems on two drives are better than one :)
If it was up to me i'd setup a raid 5 array then mirror that.

the reason I planned on the way i said is to ahve data in multiple locations since I can't trust these ppl to rotate tapes
Click to expand...

Two file systems on two drives isn't necessarily better than one. Raid 1 is probably the best bet for a small business to protect your data short of tapes, which you don't trust people to rotate. The way you have it set up, Raid 1 will be alot more reliable than worrying about back up scripts to run as the scripts would only run once every 24 hours, the raid 1 would update as soon as the data was written. No lost work that way. The only, literally downside for you in this instance would be with 2x320gig drives in raid 1 you'd only have 320GB available. According to your numbers though that's more than enough though.

You should seriously consider raid 1 as it will eliminate alot of administration for you to do on the system and simplify things immensly for you when it comes to keeping the data safe.
 
update. The drives came in today. They're not SATA. Shipping didnt make a mistake. Boss bought 160gb ide drives instead of SATA's I chose. They're still the 1million MTBF drives though with 5year warranty.

Dont know if this mobo supports Raid Via IDE so that would made pure software raid if I wanted a Raid Mirror
 
Ruffy said:
Too late to buy more hardware
Click to expand...

Is it ever really too late to buy more hardware ;)
Software raid would work fine from a performance standpoint given the usage you have outlined. Its just nice to have a controller card.
 
do not build a server with the on-board raid controllers. Never skimp on a RAID controller.

Buy a hardware RAID card, and run a 3-4 disk RAID 5. This will greatly improve your I/O, even if you stick with SATA drives.

If memory serves a 4 channel 3ware SATA hardware raid controller starts off at about $300. considering your AD, and your E-Mail is on this one server, your ability to recover it is critical. $300 is a very small business expense.

You may also want to look into running two host servers, with just a clean windows server build, and running the production boxes inside a virtual enviorment. This will make rapid recovery, fall-back and DR a piece of cake, with out buying lots of expensive back up software, plug-ins, agents, and hardware.

In this type of system each of the two phyisical host boxes are capable of running the virtual serves. with simple replication, the virtual drives of the servers reside on both hosts, creating a hot spare server for all of you production servers with just two phyisical servers.

If one phyisical server fails, you simply start the virtual server on the other host. A clustered shared drive array is the best place to store the virtual drive files, but replication will do. And simple heart beat scripts will allow automated fail over for less money than a simple single drive back-up system with the software w/ exchange agent and a 5 pack of tapes.

Good luck
 
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