Re: Unix box Spec - help please
From: jpd (read_the_sig_at_do.not.spam.it.invalid)
Date: 02/03/05
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Date: 3 Feb 2005 22:22:57 GMT
Begin <36f8512b.0502030023.525e166d@posting.google.com>
On 2005-02-03, Rich <ricko_c@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Just hoping someone can help
> We are looking at introducing a MLE into a college - an outside
> company have given us a spec of:
>
> Supermicro 4U Tower/Rack
> 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon Processors
> 1GB ECC RAM
> 2 x 200 GB S-ATA Drives
Well, as has been observed, this is a PC. I won't go into whether this
or another platform would be better. If the supplier sells peecees they
often sell not much else. As you'll notice, these specs are only part.
Some general notes: Higly clocked (ie lots of GHz; ``fast'' for the
masses) cpus tend to generate lots of heat, so putting two of them in
a 4U case (or a nice big rack tower) is much better than using, say, a
1U case. Think ``cooling! cooling! cooling!'' and don't be shy about
it. Using two cpus is prefferable over one especially if there will
be multiple processes running (as in the case where there'll be one
instance of a program for each student).
My personal preference is to take somewhat cheaper, slower cpus[1] but
be generous with memory. This is especially important with many users
and many processes (as observed above). You probably know what happens
when windows runs out of memory and starts ``paging''. Unix is not much
different; disks are much slower than memory. Think 2GB baseline, but
depending on the actual needs, much, much more.
Xeon is the expensive version of the pIV, mostly meaning more on-chip
cache. Absent specific application demands, I think I'd prefer athlon,
or if the application supports it (or might do so, shortly) opteron.
Choise of disks, like memory and cpus, highly dependent on the actual
needs of the application(s). SCSI still has merits, but if those aren't
specifically called for; S-ATA is the el-cheapo way forward (ie given
the choice ATA or S-ATA, take the latter), and the disk price sweet spot
(lowest price/GB) is currently at about 200GB disks. So this is a fairly
colourless choice. Two of them presumably for a mirrored setup.
Don't forget about the rest: un*x servers tend to completely not care
about graphics[2], but a good network card (never realtek), or maybe
multiple, is pretty important. Unices tend to run a bit hotter and
be more suspectible to heat than windows. Not much, but enough to be
noticable in heat problems when dirty and neglected. Again, a nice
and roomy case with lots of room for airflow, in a cool place with
reasonably clean air (use dustfilters on the inflow if necessairy, clean
regularly) saves a lot of headaches. Stable power is desirable: sturdy
and slightly overspec'ed power supplies and maybe something to take the
spikes and dips out of the power, if not outright a nice UPS.
> I understand PC's, but not anything to do with UNIX, and am a little
> in the dark.
As ObOtherPoster pointed out, windows is more resource demanding. So
if you think this might work on windows, modula user load and whatnot,
it'll probably do fine for most unices. Except that you still have a PC.
> Now I know you will say it depends on traffic, jobs etc, but I really
> only want to know if this is a standard spec for a UNIX server.
Again, I fully agree with ObOtherPoster; there is no single standard
for un*x servers just as there isn't for many other things. And without
knowing more details about the expected load, comp.unix.admin won't be
able to offer much more specific advice, either.
Some things to think of before asking again there are: how many people
will be doing what, exactly? Is there, say, graphics involved, and if
so, will there be client machines to do the bulk of the drawing or is
the server going to do that? Will the server just push some data back
and forth and keep the score, so to say, or will it have to do the
bulk of the work and do the clients just show some results? Lots of
interesting information follows from observing what machine will be
doing what, exactly. Start with the needs, giving you a base for a more
educated guess.
[1] Take the prices of contemporary same-model cpus of varying speeds
and draw them in a simple linear graph. Note anything interesting?
For bonus points, do the same with prices one, and two years back.
[2] Real servers are headless; they don't even have a graphics adapter.
You access them over serial if you have to, or over the network in
all other cases. Their BIOSes support this from the ground up.
-- j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
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