need some advice on server purchase

[nephish]

lo there all,
our company is running a dell 2.8 ghz p4 with 1 gig of ram. We have been getting lots of traffic of late, and lots of work for our MySQL engine. So, the boss wants to upgrade our hardware. Now, what we have been looking at is a dual core, dual cpu with RAID 5, 4 gig of RAM, and SCSI drives ( at 15000rpm ).
Now, much of this is new to me, and i am the company alpha-geek, so i need some info before i make a reccomendation.

First off, the unit will run ubuntu edgy, MySQL, apache and rails. Should be no problem, and i know i will have to read up on how to set up RAID. Tis ok. But what i need to know is what advantage we will get out of the processors being set up like this.

If i have a dual core, dual processor running at 2ghz, is that roughly the same as having an 8 ghz machine ? i know the jump in RAM will be a performance boost, but i dont know how much extra performance we will get out of our drives being that much faster.

So i guess my main question is, from your experience out there, is this a big upgrade, ( because it is an expensive one ) ? Is there any gotchas out there i need to be aware of ? And, are there any good how-to's for a newbie to get info on what advantages one configuration of hardware has over another ? And, how to set something like this up.

If you have read this far, thanks for your time.

[dkeav]

yes, this is a big upgrade, fortunatly most of your server applications are capable of taking advantage of a multithreaded system and will benefit from more processors/cores, mysql/apache (even lighttpd) for example

the extra memory is a huge boost as you already know, now the raid will not be as much as a performance boost, though if its going agaist say a single IDE drive or so, yea its going to have quite a bit more throughput, plus the advantage of being able to lose a drive and keep going in some state

couple the redundancy of raid5 with some redundant power supplies you start to enter the domain of high availability, which for mission critical servers is a must

personally i think all the choices but the scsi drives make sense, the scsi drives are high end enough to give you the extra performance, but they make up a large portion of the price of the machine, i think sataII is a perfectly good alternative especially with raid cards by say 3ware that have good NCQ support, you end up losing a small amount of throughput comparativly, but save yourself a ton of money and gain a lot more storage space

just my two cents though

[XiaoKJ]

If your system ran on a dell p4 2.8ghz 1gb ram for all these while and managed to do well, then you shouldn't need the SCSI drives as dkeav suggested. I haven't used one myself, but unless your server keeps sending out large files from the HDD, it makes no sense to have fast drives at all, esp if your internet connection is slower than the drives. SataII should suffice for your needs.

Why ubuntu? AFAIK ubuntu is designed to be user-friendly and not a lean mean server OS. Although it is more than possible to make it work, I don't see why its a good idea. IMHO, debian always had the better reputation as the server OS than ubuntu, and they shouldn't be too different for the admining to be different.

dual core, dual processor 2GHz != 8GHz!!! Performance is hardly ever compared like that! However, you can expect huge gains if your load is high and all-rounded.

Before even suggesting RAID, you must see if RAID is suitable for you. Is your system misson-critical such that it cannot fail halfway through a transaction? Or is your system required to give military-grade precision? Or is your system supposed to work very fast but not important to be reliable? All these have different RAID schemes you know?

Finally, its all down to a matter of need. Which parts of your system is heavily taxed? which parts aren't even close to being maxed out? If ram is the problem, adding ram will help. Otherwise, all the ram added will go to waste.

[psych-major]

Try these guys (http://http://ioncomputer.com/ION/EntryPoint.cfm?). Their hardware is excellent, they are pleasant to deal with, and they will even preload Ubuntu for you, with all the drivers and stuff you need!

I've purchased more than 50 servers from them thus far, and I highly recommend them!

[nephish]

man, thanks a lot for this.
we are going with redundant power supplies, etc..
i will also check into the sata2 as an alternative.

one last thing.... will most servers connect to a monitor ? Is this a stupid question ?
i am not looking for a rack mount, especially, but the data input system is a gtk, GUI app.

thanks again for your help

[nephish]

thanks for the link, psych ! but i think its broken

[psych-major]

Why ubuntu? AFAIK ubuntu is designed to be user-friendly and not a lean mean server OS. Although it is more than possible to make it work, I don't see why its a good idea. IMHO, debian always had the better reputation as the server OS than ubuntu, and they shouldn't be too different for the admining to be different.

The vendor I mentioned previously has a bunch of servers at a federal agency that run Ubuntu Server. The admins there like it as a server OS, the head engineer at the server company prefers CentOS. His opinion is that it is plenty fast enough, but a little lacking in robustness as compared to CentOS.

[psych-major]

thanks for the link, psych ! but i think its broken

Sorry, try this one (http://ioncomputer.com/)
http://ioncomputer.com/

[psych-major]

man, thanks a lot for this.
we are going with redundant power supplies, etc..
i will also check into the sata2 as an alternative.

one last thing.... will most servers connect to a monitor ? Is this a stupid question ?
i am not looking for a rack mount, especially, but the data input system is a gtk, GUI app.

thanks again for your help

The 2U version at the place I linked is rackmount, with both front or rear attached KVM (or both, if that's your thing)

Also, they're currently recommending SAS drives. I'm using SATAII to run them as fibre-attached storage appliances attached to $1 million Unisys mainframes, and the performance on the drives is just fine, with RAID 5.

[nephish]

way cool. thanks a lot !

[XiaoKJ]

If you foresee large increases in the server requirements, going rack-mount should be expected. In that case, the data input system can either become consoled or be redirected out through VNC/X11 forwarding... i.e. no monitor needed.

PS: I just meant to say that ubuntu as a whole is not what I'll consider for a server, though there are instances where they work fine. I'm more than ok with it.

[psych-major]

If you go rack-mount, try these (http://www.minicom.com/kvm.htm).

They have a LAN-based KVM solution that allows you to interact with your server or PC's desktop from anywhere with a TCP/IP connection!

[Calipso]

Hey Psych, your link is entered incorrectly.
Here (http://www.minicom.com/kvm.htm) is the correct link. :)

[psych-major]

Thanks. If I'm not paying attention, I get two 'http' listings... :mad: