> From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Jan 7 11:39:44 1999
>
> Hello all,
>
> I've been following the list for a couple of months trying to get a feel for
> what people are using for hardware and the problems they've encountered, etc.
>
> I'd like to ask for advice/direction on what hardware to purchase for the
> following senario:
>
> Here at Fermilab we also are heavily involved providing computing power for
> the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) which produces massive amounts of large (>
> 250Mb) data sets; the data rate is something like 5Mb/second. They're already
> taken care of getting the data off the telescope, onto tapes, and into the
> reduction machine (some big iron DEC 16 or 32 processor monster). However,
> we're considering using a Quad Xeon Linux box to do some final analysis of the
> data. This is what we're thinking of purchasing:
>
> MB - SC450NX
> CPU - 4-400MHz Xeons
> RAM - 1Gb ECC
> HD - 0.5 Tb (11-47Gb Seagate drives in an external rack)
> Ether - EEPro 10/100 (onboard, right?)
> SCSI - Onboard SYM53C896
> Kernel - 2.1/2.2
>
> I should mention that we're not worried about backup or RAID.
>
> The things we're concerned about are >500 Gb disk, and the Symbios
> controllers. Also, is there an advantage to using the AD450NX over the SC450NX?
>
> This is primarily a CPU intensive machine: once a ~250Mb data set is loaded it
> won't unload for a while (.5 or more hours) so I don't think I need to worry
> terribly about IO (otherwise we'd consider big iron again: Sun, SGI, or
> something).
>
> Does this sound feasible, or should I run straight to my Sun rep?
>
> Thanks, in advance.
I think this is one of those cases where a dedicated RAID array like
a Network Appliance Filer would be more appropriate. Hanging a bunch
of large disks off a symbios controller definitely isn't going to work
worth a darn.
Chris
--
Christopher Mauritz
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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