Jean-Louis Bergamo writes:
> > I'll buy a gigabit switch and a few gigabit ethernet cards.
>
> Free provide directly Giga Port to server. i don't think you need to buy
> a new switch (but ask JM before for this).
Free will provide a single ether cable, not one for each machine.
> for "filer" server, SCSI is the best for 2 reasons :
> - dedicated processor on SCSI card provide better performance on heavily
> charged server (CPU don't have have to manage physical I/O on disks)
> - on recent SCSI card, bus length can be 320 MB/s and SCSI drives can
> use this bus in the same time (instead of IDE).
Last time I checked (5 years ago ;-) the *effective* transfert
rate between SCSI and IDE was equivalent (modulo 20% which is not
significant for our needs).
Do you figure we can expect an effective 100MB/s transfert rate
on SCSI3 disks nowadays ? This is a newbie question, I know ;-)
> So if you have money and need good perf for your filer: buy a good SCSI
> card (RAID card is better) and a lot of SCSI Drive (it is better to have
Handling a RAID card was (is ?) a pain for little benefit
compared to RAID5 soft (benefit is only that your performances don't
drop while reconstructing a damaged drive). Again, old memories. Would
you recommend a RAID5 card with native linux kernel support and
full featured management software (failure notification + reconstruction
replacement) shipped with Debian ?
If Free Software sysadmin support + drivers are here for a widely
distributed RAID5 card (last thing we want is to buy a little used RAID5
card that will die or fail on us within 24 month), then I'm go for it.
I'll research hardware matching to get an idea of how much it
costs. It has to be a 1U machine, that's the trouble. Unless we're ready to
replace the 4 shuttles.
Cheers,
--
Loic Dachary, 12 bd Magenta, 75010 Paris. Tel: 33 8 71 18 43 38
http://www.fsffrance.org/ http://www.dachary.org/loic/gpg.txt
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