We are building a dedicated server for about 300 sites which are mixed type - dynamic/static.

I need your opinion on the configuration below. And if any of you have any experience with some piece of hardware below, please let me know.

Tyan Tiger MPX S2466N mobo (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tigermpx.html) (dual Athlon MP, up to 4GB PC2100 DDR RAM)
Dual Athlon MP 1600
2 GB PC2100 registered DDR RAM (4x512)
2x SCSI IBM Discovery 18GB 10K HDD
Adaptec 29160 controller
+ good cooling of course :)

Is this hardware good? What about performance? Would it hold 500 average accounts?

Thank you for your opinions.

It can most likely handle the load for 500 clients, but what i'd recommend is splitting the clients onto 2 servers.

Lets say your server is down, you wouldnt want 500 people down your neck, just a note.

Nice system by the way, I would had chosen Intel my self :D

That looks a good spec - but with 2x Athlon Mp 1600's, and 10K scsi drives, you're going to have enough heat to cook lunch - so make sure you do have plenty of cooling.

Matt

if i have this right registered memory is slower then your normal ddr memory. It will be able to handle that load though. If not you can scale up to 4gig and that should be more then enough. It all depends on what your clients are doing. I mean a badl written cgi script accessed by a lot of people can bring down that server.

Originally posted by zupanm
if i have this right registered memory is slower then your normal ddr memory. It will be able to handle that load though. If not you can scale up to 4gig and that should be more then enough. It all depends on what your clients are doing. I mean a badl written cgi script accessed by a lot of people can bring down that server.

If you are able to see the difference in speed between an EEC DDR ram chip and a non EEC chip, you are in the wrong business. The speed difference is so minute you would have a very hard time noticing it even with a analyzer. No offense intended :D

i have seen a difference in non ddr registered. Like i said it wouldn't make a difference in webhosting.

I think you should make it 2x 36 GB SCSI instead if you are planning to put 300-500 clients on it. And my recommendation is to put the server in a 4u rackmount chasis for cooling and temperature purposes.

Thank you everybody.

Yes, I intend to put this in a 4U rackmount case. I'm also thinking about 2x36 gig instead of 2x18. It would make more sense.

What about drive type? Some geek here at my local computer dealer keeps telling me that I'm throwing away my money with SCSI drives and that IDE drives are fine these days for a server - they are fast enough, reliable and much cheaper. But anyway, I think I should really use SCSI drives in such a server because they perform better under heavy load. And I still think they're more reliable. I'm prepared to pay more, just to sleep better, if nothing else. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If you are going to spend all this money, I would suggest you add another drive and get yourself a RAID controller and go RAID 5. That way if one drive goes bad, you wont be out of business. Also it gives a little performance boost. Hard drive speed is much more important than RAM. Going dual wont give much of a boost either unless you have cpu hungry clients. Usually, database driven sites tend to take more cpu resources.

I wouldn't trust the local store sales associates. They do not know what they are talking about ;)

Originally posted by md2001
What about drive type? Some geek here at my local computer dealer keeps telling me that I'm throwing away my money with SCSI drives and that IDE drives are fine these days for a server - they are fast enough, reliable and much cheaper. But anyway, I think I should really use SCSI drives in such a server because they perform better under heavy load. And I still think they're more reliable. I'm prepared to pay more, just to sleep better, if nothing else. Please correct me if I'm wrong.


All depends on what kind of SCSI your using, and what kind of IDE you are using, yeah, if you set a 2 year old SCSI drive next to a ATA/100 disk, the SCSI will get shot down.. Generally, I'd want the warrenty off of the SCSI, mostly I see 5 year warrentties on them, and 3 year on the IDE.. Of course you don't plan on having them that long, but when your using a HDD for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, you tend to wear them out faster..... RAID 1 will slow you down just a bit, but its worth it for the backup capablity....

If your going for RAID 5, I wouldn't use AMD's, they'd just be to hot, and your going to be putting some serious cash into a good RAID 5 setup + disks.... It would be fast, but the money your putting into it isn't worth it...

Really, I'd go with the above comment and get two servers that are smaller and split them.....

I may have prejudices against AMD but I really would not use AMD in a server. They may be faster but they run so hot that they can really cause problems in a server environment.

If I was you, I would look at something like this:

Tyan S2518UGN
Dual P3 1.26ghz 512k cache
2GB Registered ECC PC133 SDRAM
2x18GB 10K RPM U-160 HDs

The motherboard has an Adapcted dual channel SCSI controller on-board which is perfect for 2 hard drives. If your budget is filled, I would also consider 15K RPM SCSI drives instead of 10K RPMs as they're significantly faster.

This setup should be able to host quite a lot of accounts/domains. 300 sites shouldn't make any problems on this server.

Regards,
Gernot

I don't know if it's budget reasons, but I would rather buy the server(s) from a vendor so that you can have hardware support taken care of, without stressing your self out if something goes wrong with HW.

I agree with cabalstudios. Buy two smaller servers instead of one big server. You'll reap benefits of redundnacy and load balancing. I would still have the servers with dual CPUs if possible.

Also, how are you configuring the drives. Are you planning on using a RAID level? If at all possible you would want to reduce your SPOF's (Single-point of Failure) so get 2 36GB drives and mirror them. I don't know what the discovery's are. Are they ultra-2's?

You can also get 2 nic's and use etherlink which would double throughput on the cards.

there are like 10 posts I didn't even see.

Anyway, RAID 5 doesn't increase performance, because you take a hit on the writes. RAID 5 doesn't solve redundacy unless you have a parity and a spare. If you lose a drive in a RAID 5 config and you don't have a parity or spare your screwed. Even if you have the spare drive, the whole array needs to be rebuilt with the parity.

Mirroring the drives will not slow you down, becuase you can "write-behind" so that the drives are kept in sync when tehy're load is small.

Nothing is more important than RAM. There is a law of diminishing return, but if your wondering whether to get less RAM and a faster drive, get the RAM. Remember, in a perfect computing world there wouldn't be any drives, because everything would fit into memory.