?s bout building first corporate server ever

[OlorinBD]

My company is getting both a webserver and a database server at rackspace.com. My feeling is that database stuff is more CPU intensive than web serving. is that basically correct (yes, I realize that it depends on site activity, etc., but in general I'm wondering where power is more crucial). Secondly, would a dual MP setup be tremendously faster for the DB, that is, do database servers utilize both CPUs very effectively? Right now we're looking at P3-866 with 512MB for web server ($450/month) and P3-1GHz with 1GB for database ($940) versus a dual AthlonMP-1.2GHz with 1 GB DDR for $1250 (or maybe less - that one isn't an actual quote yet). Are these decent ideas. how bout that Athlon one? Lastly, can anyone recommend RAID configurations and whether or not to have something like DAT backup. yes, I'm basically asking you guys to design our servers for me. Thank you.

 

[spidey07]

<< yes, I'm basically asking you guys to design our servers for me >>



that is gonna be pretty tough given that we don't know:

1) OS
2) DB platform
3) size of DB
4) Web server
5) If the guy coding the DB knows what he is doing (if not then multiply hardware 10 fold)
6) traffic volmue, avg query time, expected response time.

In general DB servers are processor/cache/disk IO intensive. In general web servers don't do much until you start getting high transaction number (thousands of simultaneous users). Server sizing is really VERY difficult (well, not difficult - just educated guess work) and the best bet is to overspec the hardware or at least provide hardware that can grow easily without major surgery. Then again I'm just a plumber and as long as the web/backend/clients are talking lickety split then my job is done.

I'll give it a shot....
web server - 2GB ram, dual proc, mirrored disk for OS/APP, mirrored disk for swap.

DB server - 4 GB ram on board that can scale to 8, dual proc on board that can scale to 8, mirrored disk OS, mirrored/striped disk swap, mirrored/striped disk DB. Swap/OS on one controller, DB on one controller, backup on another...all on separate PCI busses...all fiberchannel to storage unit. Backup is integrated into storage unit.

 

[Poontos]

With the OS being FreeBSD on the webserver, for example, you could easily get away with "half" the amount of beef in the hardware, without sacrificing speed, when relatively compared to a Win2K Server box.

Say:

-Dual Intel PIII
-Intel BX board or the Asus CUR-DLS
-1GB ECC RAM
-RAID 0+1 w/ 2 IBM or Seagate Cheatah's via a Mylex AcceleRAID 170 for example.
-DAT backup running off the onboard SCSI controller, not the RAID controller.

This webserver would absolutely scream!

DB Server: What spidey07 has suggested.


Good luck!

 

[RagManX]

In general, web servers and database servers both tend to hit I/O bounds limits far before hitting CPU limits. What this means is you need huge chunks of memory and insanely fast hard drive access for heavy duty processing much more than heavy duty CPU power. This doesn't mean you can neglect the CPU by any means, but if you just start with the most current CPU family, you can usually get away with any speed. Then focus on memory and I/O bandwidth, you should be fine. By going latest generation processer, you can usually make a speed upgrade rather easily when needed. On the other hand, not focusing on high performance for memory and I/O in the first place can leave you stuck, as you can't as easily change those to something better.

RagManX

 

[Woodie]

All SCSI. (I know, it seems obvious, but)..
Hardware RAID, strongly suggest you use the RAID card provided by the server vendor...(No Promise or IDE crap).
When talking costs, also calculate the cost per hour of having one or the other server down. This is the ammunition you need to get the company to spend the $$ up front on a *reliable* fast system.
Typically, RAID 5 would be used, but if you want to spend the $$ and the extra performance is important to you, you could use RAID 1 instead.
Backup of some sort is *mandatory*. How else would you recover your server if the site got defaced? or worm-infected?
What Spidey said (even if he's just a plumber--do you know how much plumbers make?!). CPU speeed is generally one of the less important factors in server sizing...how many of them and the other things are more important.

Redundancy in general is also important: PSU, NICs, HDs, Registered (ECC) memory, CPUs, RAID controllers, RAID channels, etc..

--Woodie

 

[OlorinBD]

Ok, I got some stats:

1) OS = Win2K
2) DB = SQL 2K
3) size of DB = 10-100MB
4)Web server = Win2K (since we've become married to asp)
5)DB guy seems to know what he is doing
6) traffic volume - 15k uniques/day, max 10k/hour

also, we have 3 people in office who will be using the DB literally constantly (sales guys entering data while taking calls + email + watching data coming directly in through site on the new web server). Is my talk of single processors and 512 MB ram laughable? Do we need about 10 times that capacity? This is managed hosting, so keep in mind that we are basically having to pay the equivalent of all of any upgrade x12/year (that is, if I want another hd, then we basically have to pay 100% of the cost of that hd every month, almost).

 

[spidey07]

cool, thanks for the specs. That will help a lot.

I think what I provided was overkill for what you're trying to do but you should definately bump up the RAM to 2 GB (its cheap ya know). Helps as well to have buku cache on the processor (pentium XEON or SPARC)

Like woodie said - biggest performance comes from disk I/O. This is where mutliple controllers and separate physical disks for swap, DB, and OS come into play.