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F E A T U R E

Building Blocks

December 1, 2002
By Lori MacVittie, Steven Schuchart Jr. and James Hutchinson

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On Servers and Storage

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Electric Slide
	On Servers and Storage
	Network Infrastructure
	Lessons Learned

On the server front, the first and easiest decision was to use rackmount servers. From there things got hairy.

First, we decided to use external storage. This meant that the servers could be relatively small. However, we needed to ensure that we'd have enough bandwidth and that the machines were reliable enough to handle our business environment. It was our intent to make sure each server, with the exception of the machines donated by Hewlett-Packard (hey, beggars can't be choosers), was powerful enough to handle the load of NWC Inc.'s applications for the next three years. Luckily, the HP machines were excellent, if slightly older, models and will be more than adequate for us now and in the foreseeable future.

All the machines we purchased or received as donations have dual hot-swappable power supplies and dual power-input sources (dual power input was a secondary consideration). We also made sure the main servers would feature dual Gigabit Ethernet NICs in a failover/load-balance mode to guarantee not only sufficient bandwidth but connectivity in the event of NIC failure. We purchased three 2U Dell 2650 servers in a dual-processor configuration with Gigabit copper NICs.

Inventory

We know what you're thinking: This all sounds great, but what did it cost? Although we did have some gear donated, we know that's not an option for you, so we've included a detailed cost breakdown. Salary and physical plant expenditures are based on the going rates in Green Bay.

We also purchased, as a Web server, a 1U Dell server with Red Hat Linux preinstalled. In addition, we received several server flavors from HP: a DL580 with four Intel Pentium III Xeon processors at 900 MHz; an ML570 with four Pentium III Xeon processors at 900 MHz; and, most impressive, a truly massive DL760 with eight 900-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors. Each HP machine has four 36-GB SCSI hard disks in a Level 5 RAID configuration. On every machine, the OS and application software reside on the local RAID, with data on the external NAS (network-attached storage) system.

We received two NAS1000 NAS heads from Network Storage Solutions. These NAS heads feature 2.2-GHz Intel Xeon processors and 1 GB of RAM in a 1U form factor. We also received approximately 800 GB of Fibre Channel RAID 5 storage from Xyratex, which also supplied us with the StorageAppliance 1502 near-line storage box to be used as a backup device. The StorageAppliance 1502 has eight 160-GB IDE drives configured in a RAID 1 array with an included 3Ware Escalade ATA RAID controller. Once the current NWC Inc. environment is stable, we'll send this device to our Syracuse facility to act as off-site backup.

In the initial configuration, we decided not to use a tape solution, but instead to test the viability of disk-to-disk backup. If we find we need to add a tape solution, the StorageAppliance 1502 will act as an intermediate storage device for a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup system, reducing our backup window. The NAS devices have dual copper Gigabit Ethernet connections that plug into our NAS1000 switch. Using a pure NAS solution is a grand experiment. If it doesn't cut the mustard, we'll have to implement a SAN solution, but that's fodder for another article.