Penguincomputing just told me that the production lead time on the new
server will be 7-10 days from now. So I would anticipate that the new
server will be shipped, oh, I guess next Wednesday or so. Possibly
Jason will install it next Friday.
At that time, he'll also be attempting -- yet again -- to successfully
finish the upgrade to the existing machines. The problems we've had
there are mysterious and complex, and I guess Jason or Brion could
explain it better than I can. To my knowledge, though, we don't yet
have a solution, but possibly I will be buying some more parts (power
supplies, different RAM?) to help resolve that.
When all is said and done we should end up with 2 Dual Athlon MP 2800
frontend webservers with 4 gig of RAM each, and the Dual Opteron 246
DB server with 4 gig of RAM as well.
For load balancing across those two machines, we have a number of
options, but my guess is that just serving en from one machine and
everything else from the other will be an acceptable first pass.
When the mood strikes us, we can use just about any kind of simple
machine to do iptables based load balancing. I've done this before,
and it works amazingly well. Probably a simple $1500 machine would be
overkill for this. Maybe Bomis can dig something up to give to us, a
hand-me-down from the ongoing Bomis upgrade program.
The Opteron is going to have 5 73 gig 10,000 RPM SCSI drives in a RAID
10 configuration, which means as I understand it, data striping on 2
disks on one controller channel with mirroring on the other controller
channel, and then there will be 1 hot spare drive in the machine.
So that's performance and redundancy.
Anyhow, the logical capacity is 140 gig.
The machine is shipping with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64
preloaded. We don't have to keep that, although it'll be super easy
to just keep it and I personally prefer that we do. But if there's a
huge outcry to switch to Debian or Redhat, I'll defer to the most
active developers, although we should be aware that installing a
different OS is likely to slow down our installation by a day -- or
more, if there's any kind of disaster.
--Jimbo