With the sudden reaching of our $6,000 goal, we have money to go shopping, and I want to do it right away. Jason will be in San Diego on Monday to finish the first round of upgrades, and I'd love it if he had to drive back down there on Friday to install the new big db machine.
We actually have $7,000 in Paypal which I can transfer to our regular bank account, where we already have almost $2,500 of my money that I put in to kick things off. So that's an actual available funds of $9,500, although of course we should NOT spend it all on the database machine unless that's the best thing to do.
Here's what I have lined up at penguincomputing.com for $7,108.00.
Please comment. One thing totally left open here is how to partition the RAID volume, probably Brion and others can give good advice about the best way to do that.
One of the toughest decisions is which exact RAM to buy. 1GB pieces are a lot cheaper, and there are 8 total slots available. So I thought: buy 4 1GB pieces, and there's plenty of room for growth. When 2GB pieces drop in price (which I'm sure they will, and quickly), we have room for 8 gig more or 12 total. Or, if absolutely needed, we could move these 1GB pieces to other machines in our future network, and fill this server up to the full 16gig.
It would cost $778 more to have 2x2Gig = 4 versus what I have, which is 1x4Gig = 4.
For the RAID, I selected 4x36gig in a RAID 5 array, for a logical drive capacity of 105 gig. I also selected 1 extra hot spare drive, just for that much more added reliability. There are many other possibilities for this, and I'm open to recommendations. My impression is that with RAID 5, more drives means more performance, but with enough RAM, we shouldn't be hitting the drives that hard anyway.
Component Summary
Standard Features 3U (5.25") Rackmount Chassis Dual AMD Opteron 200 Series Processors Up to 16GB of PC2100 ECC Reg. DDR RAM Integrated Dual Channel ATA-100 Controller Up to Seven Hot-swappable 3.5" Hard Drive Bays Dual Integrated Gigabit NICs Three Available PCI Slots Integrated Video SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 Preload Altus 3200 Documentation Penguin Computing Three Year Warranty Selected Features Altus 3200 Hot Swap Power Supply Dual AMD Opteron 246 Processors 4GB Low Profile PC2700 ECC DDR (4 x 1GB) Up to 6 Drives on 2 SCSI Channels in two 3-bay SCA Internal Enclosures LSI 320-2: 2 Channel RAID 64MB w/battery backup 105.0 GB RAID 5 Volume (4+1) 36GB, 10,000RPM Low Profile SCA 52X IDE CD-ROM Rackmount Ball-Bearing Rails (Rack Depth 26") Preload ONLY, SuSE Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 Standard Three Year Warranty
Resource Summary
PROCESSOR MAIN MEMORY Total installed memory -> 4096 MB Free memory slots -> 1 SIMM Free memory slots -> 4 DIMM NETWORK INTERFACE 1GB/sec Copper -> 2 RJ-45 DISK INTERFACE Total SCA Drive Bays (Low Profile) -> 6 bays Free SCA Drive Bays (Low Profile) -> 1 bays Total 5.25" Drive Bays -> 6 bays IDE Interface -> 4 RAID Channels -> 2 PCI / ISA Slots PCI slots -> 7 total PCI slots PCI slots -> 6 free PCI slots Video
Disk Storage Summary
Mount Point Partition Size File System
RAID 5 Volume (4+1) x 36GB, 10,000RPM Low Profile SCA Logical Capacity: 105 GB unallocated 105.0 GB (100.0)
Unassigned Partitions / ext3 6.00 GB /boot ext3 80 MB /home ext3 0 MB /var ext3 1.02 GB swap swap 2.04 GB TOTALS Logical Capacity: 105.0 GB, Allocated Capacity: 0.0 GB (0.0 %) Unallocated Capacity 105.0 GB (100.0)