[Tfug] Advice on building a new machine

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 08:39, John Hubbard <ender8282 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It might help people if you go into a little more details about how this
> machine will be used... You mention describe it as replacing a crippled
> server/workstation; are you going to be using this machines as a file
> server, db server, development machine...?
>
>
>> * Solid state storage
>> As we need a decent amount of storage on this machine, I will be
>> installing between two and four regular hard drives in either a RAID1
>> ...
>
> As far as SSDs go an interesting article to read would be
> http://www.anandtech.com/show/5518/a-look-at-enterprise-performance-of-intel-ssds.
> They go into a lot of details about longevity and performance.


Thanks to all for the input so far.  Yes, I should have been a bit
more clear about what this machine will be used for.  I think it would
be best to look at it as a super-workstation or a jack of all trades.
It will handle a little bit of everything - file storage, data
processing, code development - but is unlikely to be used heavily for
any single task.

I guess there is a disconnect between what most people on this list
think of as a "server" and my usage.  I'm using the term only in the
most general sense.  Which is to say that the machine will have a web
server, email server, SSH/SCP/SFTP access, etc.  But, I'm only looking
at around five *regular* users and a handful of far less frequent
users.  It sits on a desk and occasionally somebody will use it as a
desktop machine, but most work is done remotely.

The image processing jobs are quite varied as are the size of the data
sets.  It's fair to say that the machine will spend far more time idle
than busy, but the important thing is that it is capable of these
jobs, not their frequency.

With the typical workload being small, I think that virtualization or
a NAS is likely to be far too much added complexity and/or cost.

Thank you very much for the Anandtech SSD article.  It was extremely
informative and just the sort of thing I needed to know.  Given our
current workload and what I can guess the future load to be like, it
doesn't look like I need to worry about SSD longevity at all, given
the time frame I expect and provided I leave enough unpartitioned
space on the drives for proper wear leveling.

As for some of the other areas, I suppose it would be best to not rock
the boat?  Stick with XFS and md/lvm for the on-disk configuration.  I
know it works and less headaches that way.

I hope I've been a little more clear this time.  I'm not looking to
serve up a major website here or anything like that.  I can make
myself a whiz-bang desktop PC upgrade for roughly $500-$1000.  For
this project, I'm looking to spend approximately $3000.  I just want
to make sure I spend it as efficiently as possible.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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