Re: Xserve Recommendations
This WebDNA talk-list message is from 2003
It keeps the original formatting.
numero = 52183
interpreted = N
texte = A couple of additional comments... I would always opt to go dual-processor. I would have the same concerns as Donovan about consolidating to one piece of hardware. What happens when the power supply dies? I think that it comes down to how mission-critical are the sites? How often does the data change? If you can't afford the downtime and lost data (i.e., data that was stored since the last backup) associated with a failed hard drive and recovering from a back-up, then RAID is a must-have. I also have been using SoftRAID 2.2 on a Blue&White G3 for years and it has worked great. I never had a drive fail, but I always felt secure that the software was doing it's thing. This comfort comes primarily from the fact that there was an indication of RAID status... if I had to reboot my machine for instance, the RAID monitor would come up with a "drives out of sync" indication and I could either reset the indication (if I *knew* the drives were not out of sync) or I could rebuild the drives (which I always did). I'm glad to hear that there is a 3.0 version out and would not hesitate to go that route if I could not afford an Apple RAID system. I would not use the RAID feature of OS X 10.2. It may work great, but documentation on it is scarce and I know of no monitoring capabilities. How would I know it's working? Does it auto-rebuild somehow after a power failure? Who knows. I wouldn't sleep. :) I would not go with a RAIDking unit. I bought a RAID system from them about 16 months ago and after 3 months of fiddling around, I ultimately sent it back. Don't get me wrong, it seemed like a great system and the folks I worked with were great, but I did not have confidence that it was truly Mac-compatible. At the time I had to buy a special SCSI card (Atto) for it since the Adaptec one that came with my Mac was not compatible. This was another $400 (card and cable) that I didn't intend to spend and granted was not necessarily RAIDKing's issue (though they should know what cards do and don't work with their equipment). The real issue was that after a few days of operation, I got an indication of something like 3 or 4 drive failures. I was running L5, I think, and what this meant was that I lost everything. After replacing drives (more cost) to prove that the drives were not the issue (I'm still using all the drives to this day) and getting another unit, I still had problems. Retrospect was not able to back up some files because of apparent file corruptions, which made me think that there was some basic problem with how the drive was being mapped that was not Mac-compatible. I'm having trouble remembering all the details, but in the end, I never felt confident that the RAID controller and system was doing what it should and without the ability to do a reliable back-up of the data, this was not a good situation. After many hours of troubleshooting (by both parties), I sent it back and incurred a 15% restocking fee ($800). So, my recommedation would be to go with an Apple RAID system if you can afford it and SoftRAID if you cannot. After all, you're essentially buying peace-of-mind with RAID and I can tell you that after spending $5000+ on the system, the one thing I had experienced was loss-of-mind. :) A lot can improve in 16 months and like I said, the people I dealt with were great, but this was my experience and my two cents. Brian On 8/12/03 10:55 AM, "Donovan"
wrote: > Clint Davis wrote: >> >> Current hosting situation: >> 2 - G4/450 | 20GB SCSI HD | 768MB RAM | WS 4.5 >> 1 - G4/450 | 20GB SCSI HD | 768MB RAM | WS 5.3 | MySQL 3.23.55 >> 1 - G3/400 | 9GB SCCI HD | 256MB RAM | Apache 2.0.47 | PHP 4.3.2 | MySQL >> 3.23.55 >> >> Bandwidth consumption was approximately 200GB across all 4 servers for >> around 80 websites, 4 SSL's, and 20 FTP accounts. We're using WebDNA, a >> RAM-resident database, heavily on several sites. > > My question to the list is: > In my experience, When I had processor intensive code in a 4.5 setup, it > could bring my server to a stand-still for a bit. With multi-threading > and proper use of "sandboxing" today, how well can one ward off this > circumstance? (this would be the hesitation that I would have > consolidating to one machine, machine goes down, 80 sites go down > (instead of 20)). > >> 1. Should we go single processor or dual Xserve? >> 2. Do we need more than 768MB RAM? >> 3. Could we use a single 60GB drive, or do we need another drive for a RAID? > > I'll answer this one. Both Hardware RAID and Software RAID have there > advantages. Usually, Hardware RAID is a proprietary OS in itself that > has features that Software RAID does not. ( Like hotswapping, redundant > power, efficient cooling and More RAID levels) On the other hand, HW > RAID is much more expensive. I've use SoftRAID 2.2 for about 3 years > now and it has worked Flawlessly in an AppleShareIP FileShareing setup > (way more I/O than webserving but maybe of a different sort) SoftRAID > is just realeasing (probably before the end of this month) there 3.0 > product (it's been out on Beta for a good while now). 3.0 is supposed > to be thuroughly tested with even Apples G5 and it supposed to be very > Robust. If you are cost conscious, I would consider it as an option. > > www.softraid.com > support@softraid.com (speak to Mark for questions). > > www.raidking.com has a good rep and they are not as expensive as > some of the more well known companies. > > >> 4. If we go with a RAID, should we use 0 or 1? > > L5 if purchasing a hardware RAID. > >> 5. Will this handle all websites we currently host? > > Will this handle all 80 websites robustly.. is the question > I have. > :-) > > Donovan > > -- Brian Wachter 5 Moulton Street Portland, ME 04101 bwachter@stoneport.com 207.772.3826 ------------------------------------------------------------- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list . To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to Web Archive of this list is at: http://webdna.smithmicro.com/
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A couple of additional comments... I would always opt to go dual-processor. I would have the same concerns as Donovan about consolidating to one piece of hardware. What happens when the power supply dies? I think that it comes down to how mission-critical are the sites? How often does the data change? If you can't afford the downtime and lost data (i.e., data that was stored since the last backup) associated with a failed hard drive and recovering from a back-up, then RAID is a must-have. I also have been using SoftRAID 2.2 on a Blue&White G3 for years and it has worked great. I never had a drive fail, but I always felt secure that the software was doing it's thing. This comfort comes primarily from the fact that there was an indication of RAID status... if I had to reboot my machine for instance, the RAID monitor would come up with a "drives out of sync" indication and I could either reset the indication (if I *knew* the drives were not out of sync) or I could rebuild the drives (which I always did). I'm glad to hear that there is a 3.0 version out and would not hesitate to go that route if I could not afford an Apple RAID system. I would not use the RAID feature of OS X 10.2. It may work great, but documentation on it is scarce and I know of no monitoring capabilities. How would I know it's working? Does it auto-rebuild somehow after a power failure? Who knows. I wouldn't sleep. :) I would not go with a RAIDking unit. I bought a RAID system from them about 16 months ago and after 3 months of fiddling around, I ultimately sent it back. Don't get me wrong, it seemed like a great system and the folks I worked with were great, but I did not have confidence that it was truly Mac-compatible. At the time I had to buy a special SCSI card (Atto) for it since the Adaptec one that came with my Mac was not compatible. This was another $400 (card and cable) that I didn't intend to spend and granted was not necessarily RAIDKing's issue (though they should know what cards do and don't work with their equipment). The real issue was that after a few days of operation, I got an indication of something like 3 or 4 drive failures. I was running L5, I think, and what this meant was that I lost everything. After replacing drives (more cost) to prove that the drives were not the issue (I'm still using all the drives to this day) and getting another unit, I still had problems. Retrospect was not able to back up some files because of apparent file corruptions, which made me think that there was some basic problem with how the drive was being mapped that was not Mac-compatible. I'm having trouble remembering all the details, but in the end, I never felt confident that the RAID controller and system was doing what it should and without the ability to do a reliable back-up of the data, this was not a good situation. After many hours of troubleshooting (by both parties), I sent it back and incurred a 15% restocking fee ($800). So, my recommedation would be to go with an Apple RAID system if you can afford it and SoftRAID if you cannot. After all, you're essentially buying peace-of-mind with RAID and I can tell you that after spending $5000+ on the system, the one thing I had experienced was loss-of-mind. :) A lot can improve in 16 months and like I said, the people I dealt with were great, but this was my experience and my two cents. Brian On 8/12/03 10:55 AM, "Donovan" wrote: > Clint Davis wrote: >> >> Current hosting situation: >> 2 - G4/450 | 20GB SCSI HD | 768MB RAM | WS 4.5 >> 1 - G4/450 | 20GB SCSI HD | 768MB RAM | WS 5.3 | MySQL 3.23.55 >> 1 - G3/400 | 9GB SCCI HD | 256MB RAM | Apache 2.0.47 | PHP 4.3.2 | MySQL >> 3.23.55 >> >> Bandwidth consumption was approximately 200GB across all 4 servers for >> around 80 websites, 4 SSL's, and 20 FTP accounts. We're using WebDNA, a >> RAM-resident database, heavily on several sites. > > My question to the list is: > In my experience, When I had processor intensive code in a 4.5 setup, it > could bring my server to a stand-still for a bit. With multi-threading > and proper use of "sandboxing" today, how well can one ward off this > circumstance? (this would be the hesitation that I would have > consolidating to one machine, machine goes down, 80 sites go down > (instead of 20)). > >> 1. Should we go single processor or dual Xserve? >> 2. Do we need more than 768MB RAM? >> 3. Could we use a single 60GB drive, or do we need another drive for a RAID? > > I'll answer this one. Both Hardware RAID and Software RAID have there > advantages. Usually, Hardware RAID is a proprietary OS in itself that > has features that Software RAID does not. ( Like hotswapping, redundant > power, efficient cooling and More RAID levels) On the other hand, HW > RAID is much more expensive. I've use SoftRAID 2.2 for about 3 years > now and it has worked Flawlessly in an AppleShareIP FileShareing setup > (way more I/O than webserving but maybe of a different sort) SoftRAID > is just realeasing (probably before the end of this month) there 3.0 > product (it's been out on Beta for a good while now). 3.0 is supposed > to be thuroughly tested with even Apples G5 and it supposed to be very > Robust. If you are cost conscious, I would consider it as an option. > > www.softraid.com > support@softraid.com (speak to Mark for questions). > > www.raidking.com has a good rep and they are not as expensive as > some of the more well known companies. > > >> 4. If we go with a RAID, should we use 0 or 1? > > L5 if purchasing a hardware RAID. > >> 5. Will this handle all websites we currently host? > > Will this handle all 80 websites robustly.. is the question > I have. > :-) > > Donovan > > -- Brian Wachter 5 Moulton Street Portland, ME 04101 bwachter@stoneport.com 207.772.3826 ------------------------------------------------------------- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list . To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to Web Archive of this list is at: http://webdna.smithmicro.com/
Brian Wachter
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