Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Building Blocks: Page 3 of 7

We encountered some problems on the connectivity front. To ensure sufficient bandwidth for our new systems, we needed an Internet connection for NWC Inc. separate from the connection that supplies the Green Bay Real-World Labs®. We occasionally do ugly, disruptive things to the lab network and its Internet connection while testing, and that simply would not do for NWC Inc. We also wanted to have a second Internet provider online in the event of a catastrophic failure--or in case the ISP providing access went belly up. We learned this lesson the hard way last year in the event of @link's precipitous demise, which left us with no Internet access except dial-up for nearly a month and a half.

First, we looked to our local Baby Bell, Ameritech/ SBC. We discovered that a T1 line was too expensive on an ongoing basis and that SBC's local offerings for DSL were inadequate. We eventually settled on a 1.5-Mbps symmetrical DSL line from Choice One Communications. The only problem was that--as with DSL installs in Green Bay--secondary providers (read: anyone who isn't SBC) have to wait for SBC to perform a preinstall inspection and then allocate space in the switch. The long and the short of this is that we are using our McLeodUSA Green Bay lab connection for NWC Inc. until our permanent connection is completed by SBC and Choice One. On the plus side, we have our own Class C block of IP addresses that Choice One is thrilled to route for us at no charge because it doesn't have to assign us any of its own IP addresses.

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.