New subject: Redhat [was: Server purchase plan - advice needed quickly]

10 Oct 2003


      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)