> I'd try an alpha machine, with 66MHz-64bit PCI bus, and interleaved
> memory access, to improve memory bandwidth. It costs around $10000
> with 512MB of RAM, see SWT (or STW) or Microway. This cost is
> small compared to the disks.
The alpha comes with other headaches I'd rather not involve myself with -
in addition the costs of the disks is trivial - 7 75gig scsi's @$1k each
is only $7k - and the machine housing the machines also needs to be one
which will do some of the processing - and all of their code is X86 - so
I'm hesistant to suggest alphas for this.
> Another advantage of the alpha is that you have more PCI slots. I'd
> put 3 disks on each card, and use about 4 of them per machine. This
> should be enough to get you 500GB.
More how - the current boards I'm working with have 6-7 pci slots - no
ISA's at all.
The alphas we have here have the same number of slots.
> Might I also suggest a good UPS system? :-) Ah, and a journaling FS...
the ups is a must -the journaling filesystem is at issue too - In an
ideal world there will be a Journaling File system that works correctly
with sw raid :)
-sv
