[DCN-TechOps] Server Specs (Foward)

[Jim Frame]

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 09:07:44 -0700
From: Bill Broadley <bill at cse.ucdavis.edu>
To: Steve McMahon <steve at dcn.org>
Cc: techops <dcn-technical-committee at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us>
Subject: Re: [DCN-TechOps] Specs for new DCN server

 > Requirements for the new systems:
 >
 > * Excellent processor and memory performance to capably run Zope, Plone
 > and MySQL.

Opterons have by far the best memory system, they have a memory system
per cpu.  They also happen to win mysql benchmarks against intel machines.

 > * Ideally running Solaris, to leverage Jack's experience, but Linux or
 > BSD would be acceptable if we can't manage Solaris in our budget.

As you might imagine sun supports solaris on sun hardware, the v20z
is a quite nice machine.

 > * At least two ether ports.

Dual GigE and Dual ports for management are standard.

 > * At least RAID 1 (mirroring) capable. We don't, though, need huge
 > initial storage.

I'm running a few now with a raid-1 mirror.  They provide 2 hot-swap
parts, and on board scsi.

 > * Redundant power supplies would be nice.

This is mostly incompatible with the 1u, I'm sure one of numerous
white box vendors can build one for you though.  The suns do
have lights out management, temperature monitoring, and other
cool stuff available via the management port, which supports
ssh and snmp for full lights out management.

 > * Start w/ at least 1GB of RAM, expandable to at least 4GB.

The v20z dual 1.8 Ghz machine comes with 2GB ram and can easily
handle 16GB.

 > Budget: we need to come in under $10,000 for two similarly equipped
 > machines and 1-yr service contracts.

Hrm, sun sneaks over this with a 3 year, does DCN get any type
of .edu or non-profit discount from sun?

Sun seems to be specifically targeting opteron for future
solaris, java, and related development, they now sell duals
and quads.  If you want solaris the opteron is a very strong
candidate.  If you want linux it's also very strong.

Oh, one other thing, AMD has a per page execute bit which
adds significant protection against buffer overflows, thus
increasing the security of the system against the traditional
(and common) buffer overflow attack.

-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis
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