Need Help! Price estimate on server build

[Rubycon]

Pics of boss and her rack??

Standard racks are 19 inches wide and sluts are one inch tall. A full rack can house 96 sluts.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

Why not use Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files? You'll also have good redundancy. Your type of work is exactly what virtualization/elastic storage was made for.

Otherwise, I'd say a SAN. Call EMC.

Do data centers provide that much throughput a week? 500GB or so? I really don't know, genuine question.

 

[zinfamous]

SAN,DAS,iWARP,ZFS,CLUSTERING,RAID..... all completely pointless to this discussion.

OP, while everyone is trying to help, you are going about this ALL wrong. Everyone will try to help based on your snippets of info and integrating the final solution will be a nightmare.

THIS is what you do to get the Job done right:

1. Accept that you don't know what you are doing
2. Find the senior-most IT person at the institution that is willing to talk with you. IF this is not an option, find out who their general vendors are and schedule a conversion (CDW, etc).
3. To vendor's or IT, describe the following:
3a. Provide details on your existing hardware and software
3b. Describe your computational requirements, how your existing infrastructure has met your past needs, and how it will fail to do so in the future.
3ba. Make sure to provide details on your workflows/task licefcycles so they get a clear picture of what your running and vault requirements are
4a. If IT is available: find out if they can contribute any existing resources to your department
4b. If IT is not available try to work with the vendors to see what the institutional fabric is and how you can connect to it in the mest efficient and effective way possible for your department
5. Notify them of your budget (grant) so that they know that you cannot go above that amount
7. LISTEN TO WHAT THEY SAY
8. Consider speaking directly with hardware suppliers for additional ideas.


For now I would ignore most, if not all of the recommendations made on here as they will only serve to confuse you and the vendors by putting words in your mouth that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

For all we know you might end up with DAS islands for different parts of the data lifecycle with a SAN for the long term... or campus IT might have a nice slice in their SAN just waiting for you.

Accept that you need to delegate the research to someone else - seek out those who know what to do and you will be rewarded for your delegation

P.S. We'll be glad to critique their proposals once you have them

Believe me, I had well accepted that fact before I was even approached with this task.

...I think few in here have yet to realize, that this initial task was to put together an estimate for grant purposes. Nothing in what i mentioned is final, or in any way certain. This is still several months off before we can even approach it with any seriousness--First, one has to get the grant (hopefully), then one has to wait for the grant.

We'll also be in a better position by then (hopefully), to know where we really need to go with our data usage.

This was given to me just after 5pm, so the regulars had gone home. There was no campus staff or department that I could call to help me out here (remember, I had to submit this before midnight on the date of the OP)

All that being said, I find the info in here extremely helpful and I'm very, very appreciative. I'm realizing that the more I start to investigate this stuff, the less I know, haha.

 

[zinfamous]

Why not use Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files? You'll also have good redundancy. Your type of work is exactly what virtualization/elastic storage was made for.

Otherwise, I'd say a SAN. Call EMC.

we are currently using Amazon cloud for some of our stuff. We don't use it on a daily basis, though...and the subscription fee is considerably cheap, actually.

 

[zinfamous]

I'm going to quote myself and reiterate that you are STUPID if you are not working with a vendor to come up with a product for your needs.

seriously, go back and read the reason for posting this, and the reason I was assigned the task.

Holy hell, I NEVER had any intention of implementing anything. That is not what I was asking.

damn, dude. You IT dudes can get snippy sometimes. Too much time in hot/cold rooms or something?

 

[Goosemaster]

seriously, go back and read the reason for posting this, and the reason I was assigned the task.

Holy hell, I NEVER had any intention of implementing anything. That is not what I was asking.

damn, dude. You IT dudes can get snippy sometimes. Too much time in hot/cold rooms or something?

The CRAC'en... she is a cold bitch:awe:

 

[BoberFett]

Standard racks are 19 inches wide and sluts are one inch tall. A full rack can house 96 sluts.

Then what is under the racks of the 96 sluts?

It's sluts all the way down.

 

[Rubycon]

Then what is under the racks of the 96 sluts?

It's sluts all the way down.

Usually lots of silicon.