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Quoting Per Jessen <per@computer.org>:
Rob, I'd be interested to know your reason for going for colo rather than just renting a dedicated server (or a few).
My employer is allowing me to mount a server in their rack; they do not have servers to rent. They have a big pipe, and the rack in in close vicinity to my desk.
I think it will be difficult giving you any sound advice without knowing the load on the box, the expected reliability, availability etc.
The load is light but will be increasing; of course I don't want it to ever go down ;). But when it comes down to it, brief periods of downtime will probably go unnoticed, but this will not be a unit I expect to be intentionally taking offline for frequent upgrades or anything. There will be paying customers, but nothing mission critical.
I'd like to hear what the consensus is on the various elements of server selection; importance of various components, brand name vs. generic, Intel vs. AMD, ATA vs. SCSI, value of extended warranties, etc.
My favourite setup is something along these lines:
Dual server in Linux-HA. Both with mirrored IDE disks, unless the server will have lots of concurrent traffic, in which case I use SCSI. CPU and RAM will depend on the purpose, but always single CPU (dual CPU boards are less cost-effective, unless you're short on space), and 512-1024Mb RAM unless it's a database server where I'd probably opt for as much RAM as possible. Two NICs per node, each connected to a separate switch/network. I used mirrored disks in each node as the drives tend to be the first to go these days.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "database server". Lots of MySQL sites, but nothing like Oracle. Thanks for your feedback. Rob
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