On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 14:26, Paul Geary wrote:
Hi All
I want to put together a small server to run SuSE Linux which will form a central point between a small Solaris network and a small Windows 2000 network used for Cisco router courses (Totals around 20 machines initially). The machine would be the gateway to internet services and email (and anything else I can think of).
I'd like to experiment with a raid based system possibly dual CPU (Not strictly necessary for a small network but I want to play with these things myself and also have plenty of room for expansion should the nix side of things take off).
Any recommendations gratefully received. Cheers Paul Geary
We'll build you one. Contact chris@irlcomputers.com. Strictly speaking dual CPUs don't make that much difference when compared with their cost. We did some tests on a Linux thin client which with 16 concurrent users all on OpenOffice.org Draw you would think would make a big difference. In practice even with a 1 gig P3 the processor was never saturated, but RAM makes a lot of difference particularly if the machine starts swapping. Also the thing that makes servers expensive is the disc subsystems and backup. SCSI, RAID etc put the price up a lot. If you have plenty of RAM, and RAM is cheap, better to put money into RAM than disc drives because delivering files from solid state is always going to be faster than from a mechanical disc. Windows tends to be more disc intensive so SCSI, RAID etc will make more of a difference. A good reason for using Linux is that it saves you in hardware costs as well as software licenses. Probably cheaper to have 2 lowish spec servers and make one redundant but benefit from two in parallel than buy one all singing and dancing machine which in practice gives little real performance advantage. Actually probably two servers will out perform one anyway. Another reason people tend to buy one mega server with Windows is again licensing costs. Doesn't matter how many Linux servers you have the licensing cost is still zero. Hope this helps.
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