I am about to get a dedicated server. Just got a few questions

1. Is it wise to get dual CPU dedicated server?
Because I have noticed that to lease a Dual P3 1 Ghz CPU & 1 GB rams cost around twice as much as a single P3-866 CPU with 1GB rams. Would it be better to run 100 sites each with single CPU server or run one dual CPU server with 200 sites.

2. how much webspace is enough? I would prefer to get one 36 GB SCSI HDD. But they are much more expensive. I could get a dual IDE 40GB HDD for less. But the point here is, can a server handle 80 GB of storage if it was 80% occupied.


3. Can someone tell me what does RAIDs do? Is it worth getting?

4. Also, are they anyone offering P4 dedicated servers?? I have noticed that hostrocket are using P4 2Ghz CPU with 4 GB rams for shared hosting.

Any comment would be appreciated.

Aloha

well hope this helps sure you will get other responses

all of this depends on what you are doing with your server and how uch traffic how many sites are you running lots of CGI or PHP or is it a nix box or a win2k box etc... so I will go with
running 50 sites that are mixed some using php boards some using cgi programs etc... and some doing a lot of dynamic stuff
so
I am also going on you buying a server and colocating it so here goes

1) yes I would get aa dual or at least be able to go to it if you need ( much easier to just plugin in a new chip and get more muscel then move all to a new machine)

2) well that depends on what you are doing a ton of MP3 a ton of video then you will want space other wise 18 gig HD should give you plenty space
2a) SCSI well SCSI is a lot more money but in real not that much more
SCSI is faster and more reliable if it wasnt they would be putting IDE on high end servers people use IDE cause it is cheaper
yes it can work but SCSI works better !!!
again read storagereview
3) basically RAID will run HD in configurations much to detailed to go into here
you can run multiple HD as one (in a nutshell)
go to
www.storagereview.com
read there reference section (click on the links to expand)
read a lot there get educated on this it is a big subject and people get very dug heels in this area
in raid basically is used to give better performance or better redundancy
you can run 2 18 gig HD write data to both so if one goes south your HD keeps on running
you can configure 3 18 gig to run as a 36 gig and if one goes south your inforamtion will keep going and be just fine
(you will have to replace these HD that fail as you will suffer performance if you do not)
you can run HD for more speed (only common in video worksations usually)

so in my eyes yes raid is a must have no matter if you have backups etc...
downtime is not worth it
also note raid can be software or hardware based
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.html

4)well the P4 thing is another area where p4 are better in worksations than servers they will not run as Duals (SMP)
stick with a dual P3

Hey Honu

Thanks for your reply.

Just one more question. Does anyone know how much performance difference would there be between dual 800Mhz and dual 1Ghz CPU?

There wouldn't be that much of a performance difference...

Originally posted by GoldRush
Hey Honu

Thanks for your reply.

Just one more question. Does anyone know how much performance difference would there be between dual 800Mhz and dual 1Ghz CPU?

Aloha
double what John said
I would put the extra money into more ram ;)

Originally posted by Honu
Aloha
4)well the P4 thing is another area where p4 are better in worksations than servers they will not run as Duals (SMP)
stick with a dual P3

That may be old news now, with the new P4 Xeons. We are getting ready to order dual P4 1.7ghz xeons (3.4ghz total, with 4gig of ram, multiple 73gig scsi drives in Raid 5 array. The only drawback (if can call it that) is the server case has to be 3u but I think its worth it.

Anyone want to take a stab at how many sites fit reliably in this one? :)

Anyone want to take a stab at how many sites fit reliably in this one?

Probably the same number of pissed off people you will have if it crashes. :D

True enough, but if you are conservative with it then a machine this powerful should never have a problem.

Originally posted by Jag


That may be old news now, with the new P4 Xeons. We are getting ready to order dual P4 1.7ghz xeons (3.4ghz total, with 4gig of ram, multiple 73gig scsi drives in Raid 5 array. The only drawback (if can call it that) is the server case has to be 3u but I think its worth it.

Anyone want to take a stab at how many sites fit reliably in this one? :)

Aloha
yes they are starting to do this
but teh cost of a dual xeon adn the MB to handle it is a bit more

man what made em make the p4 though without smp ????
that was dumb move
that box would be sweeeeeet though ;)

what kind of motherboard ya running

Well its not easy finding a board to support P4 Xeon's much less ones that support 4gig of ram. SuperMicro makes some but they only suport 2gig ram but we did find a tyan board that supports 4gig ram.

Tyan Thunder i860 ( S2603 ) w/ U160 SCSI

Tell me about it Jag, we decided to leave P4s alone until someone came out with a decent Dual P4 board else we were gonna use them in our new server. We went for Dual Tualtin 1.26Ghz with 512k L2 cache on them with 4Gb ram. The 512k L2 cache really helps performance out on all test (Real world and synthetic that I've seen - but time will tell).

The board you're looking at though is the one we were going to use. How many drives are you going to be using? You can fit 4 drives in a lot of new 1U cases now, and P4s don't run all that hot, so a 2U case should do the job for you with a riser card to take the RAID controller on. Take a look at Acme Micro for a good selection of quality cases.

dual Pentium 4 .. :smash:

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/chipsets/amd/760MP/17.GIF

:cartman:

Only thing with Dual MP is that they aren't all stable, some are some aren't, there is another thread here somewhere about it.

Better build a dual PIII with Supermicro serverworks machine, colocate it with a reliable noc, host 1000 sites on it and save over $5000/year instead of renting a server.

Go DUAL SCSI or 1 SCSI + 1 IDE for back up.

:-)

Nah our current servers are dual 1ghz but we want to move on to the dual 1.7 ghz P4's.

KDA,
We will be using 3 x 73gig SCSI's in RAID 5 array. But we do plan to stick with a 3u case that can handle up to 9 hot swap drives. If larger disk space is needed we will likely go with 5 x73 gig drives still in RAID5 array.

Put at least 4 drives in the RAID 5 array, we made the mistake of using 3 drives - one got dropped from the array and all hell broke loose as RAID5 only works with 3+ drives.

RAID 5 is great for mostly read-only operations (e.g. web use). It is painfully slow for writes so if you expect to have very busy database systems on it with a lot of writes then I'd look at RAID 01 (or 10).

If you can, change the Apache log drives to RAID0 to get the quick write for striping purposes.