Order 64-bit capable machines, of course, for their
security advantages,
and speed advantages when running 64-bit software. Move to 64-bit
software as soon as reasonably possible.
Want to voice 100% approval of this. Nobody wants to hear that
Postgres compiles natively in 64-bit and makes use of it (I measured
40% increase in row-insert performance on UltraSPARC, among other
things), but it bears mentioning. I don't know whether MySQL is
n64'able. I can help building a 32/64 or a 64-bit gcc if anyone would
like help. Opteron, Opteron, Opteron. I don't think we need 64-bit
Xeon's or Itanium/Itanium2's.
vastly more reliable systems deployment. Consider
Debian as both an
operating system and a deployment system: at the moment, different
machines run different operating system flavours, making sysadminning
harder.
RedHat, of course, has its own products for these purposes. But I'm
pretty OS agnostic.
Databases are a different issue: you can't apply
the same commodity
thinking: however, try to order DB machines in identical multiples, too,
Anyone know what an 8-way 848 Opteron costs these days?
for the same reasons. Clearly the DB machines will
need to be
hand-crafted. I don't know much about databases on this sort of scale...
but I imagine the Wikipedia developers do.
First, multiplicity. Second, fast disk. Hardware raid controllers and
tablespaces which allow you to put your indices on the really fast
disk and your "big data" on the slower, cheaper, bigger disk. Is SAN
attachment an option or are we sticking with NFS? SAN over 1gbit ether
(which is where we're at) is not so bad. I mean, it could be worse.
for your servers, and hence your data and syadmin
sanity. An ounce of
prevention is again worth a pound of cure.
Amen.
Finaly, you might consider buying a cheap radio clock
on a per-site
basis, if your colo does not already provide you with a local stratum-1
Am I missing something? Can we not just sync with
{tick,tock}.usno.navy.mil? If
usno.navy.mil goes down, we have much
bigger problems than a toasted wikipedia.
Nobody's mentioned backups. Automated backups are hard to do, and
manual backups require somebody to go there and swap tapes. Is a tape
changer in the cards for us? We'd need to go with LTO or something....
and that's pretty ugly, money wise. Anyone?
aa
--
Alex Avriette
avriette(a)gmail.com