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Home > Archive > Unix questions > February 2005 > Unix box Spec - help please
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Unix box Spec - help please
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| Just hoping someone can help
We are looking at introducing a MLE into a college - an outside
company have given us a spec of:
Supermicro 4U Tower/Rack
2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon Processors
1GB ECC RAM
2 x 200 GB S-ATA Drives
I understand PC's, but not anything to do with UNIX, and am a little
in the dark.
Now I know you will say it depends on traffic, jobs etc, but I really
only want to know if this is a standard spec for a UNIX server.
I really appreciate any help - with advice, costings, etc
Thanks
Ricky
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| Chuck Dillon 2005-02-03, 5:53 pm |
| Rich wrote:
> Just hoping someone can help
> We are looking at introducing a MLE into a college - an outside
> company have given us a spec of:
>
> Supermicro 4U Tower/Rack
> 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon Processors
> 1GB ECC RAM
> 2 x 200 GB S-ATA Drives
>
> I understand PC's, but not anything to do with UNIX, and am a little
> in the dark.
> Now I know you will say it depends on traffic, jobs etc, but I really
> only want to know if this is a standard spec for a UNIX server.
>
> I really appreciate any help - with advice, costings, etc
> Thanks
>
> Ricky
I suggest google comp.unix.admin and if you don't find an answer ask
there. I don't think you're going to get any indication of a standard
spec but you might get a reference to some configuration guidelines for
different server roles.
-- ced
--
Chuck Dillon
Senior Software Engineer
NimbleGen Systems Inc.
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| Doug McIntyre 2005-02-03, 5:53 pm |
| ricko_c@hotmail.com (Rich) writes:
>Just hoping someone can help
>We are looking at introducing a MLE into a college - an outside
>company have given us a spec of:
>Supermicro 4U Tower/Rack
>2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon Processors
>1GB ECC RAM
>2 x 200 GB S-ATA Drives
>I understand PC's, but not anything to do with UNIX, and am a little
>in the dark.
>Now I know you will say it depends on traffic, jobs etc, but I really
>only want to know if this is a standard spec for a UNIX server.
This is a PC.
I assume you mean that you know Windows more than Unix.
Generally, you can just assume that most apps under Unix take up
slightly less resources on Unix than on Windows (although this is a very
broad generalization), although it depends heavily on the app like you
said. I have apps on Windows that take up way less resources than on
Unix, but I have more apps on Unix that take up less resources than
their windows counterparts.
Don't worry so much that its a different OS than Windows, use the
specs you would use for what you know. In the end, the OS doesn't
matter so much as the Application and how that particular one behaves
on the hardware you've devoted to it.
Just as there is a huge wide range of standard specs for windows
servers, the same exists for Unix class OS systems. Although you can
get very large systems that run Unix that windows can only dream
of coming anywhere close to in the next 5 years.
This PC class server would be fine for most smaller end Applications
depending on all the things that you say you know are useful metrics
but don't matter in this case  Depending on drive I/O you need, I'd
go with a SCSI drive system rather than SATA for most Unix OSs, but
thats a cost tradeoff some people make.
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| Greg Beeker 2005-02-03, 5:53 pm |
| What is a MLE?
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| Begin <36f8512b.0502030023.525e166d@posting.google.com>
On 2005-02-03, Rich <ricko_c@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Just hoping someone can help
> We are looking at introducing a MLE into a college - an outside
> company have given us a spec of:
>
> Supermicro 4U Tower/Rack
> 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon Processors
> 1GB ECC RAM
> 2 x 200 GB S-ATA Drives
Well, as has been observed, this is a PC. I won't go into whether this
or another platform would be better. If the supplier sells peecees they
often sell not much else. As you'll notice, these specs are only part.
Some general notes: Higly clocked (ie lots of GHz; ``fast'' for the
masses) cpus tend to generate lots of heat, so putting two of them in
a 4U case (or a nice big rack tower) is much better than using, say, a
1U case. Think ``cooling! cooling! cooling!'' and don't be shy about
it. Using two cpus is prefferable over one especially if there will
be multiple processes running (as in the case where there'll be one
instance of a program for each student).
My personal preference is to take somewhat cheaper, slower cpus[1] but
be generous with memory. This is especially important with many users
and many processes (as observed above). You probably know what happens
when windows runs out of memory and starts ``paging''. Unix is not much
different; disks are much slower than memory. Think 2GB baseline, but
depending on the actual needs, much, much more.
Xeon is the expensive version of the pIV, mostly meaning more on-chip
cache. Absent specific application demands, I think I'd prefer athlon,
or if the application supports it (or might do so, shortly) opteron.
Choise of disks, like memory and cpus, highly dependent on the actual
needs of the application(s). SCSI still has merits, but if those aren't
specifically called for; S-ATA is the el-cheapo way forward (ie given
the choice ATA or S-ATA, take the latter), and the disk price sweet spot
(lowest price/GB) is currently at about 200GB disks. So this is a fairly
colourless choice. Two of them presumably for a mirrored setup.
Don't forget about the rest: un*x servers tend to completely not care
about graphics[2], but a good network card (never realtek), or maybe
multiple, is pretty important. Unices tend to run a bit hotter and
be more suspectible to heat than windows. Not much, but enough to be
noticable in heat problems when dirty and neglected. Again, a nice
and roomy case with lots of room for airflow, in a cool place with
reasonably clean air (use dustfilters on the inflow if necessairy, clean
regularly) saves a lot of headaches. Stable power is desirable: sturdy
and slightly overspec'ed power supplies and maybe something to take the
spikes and dips out of the power, if not outright a nice UPS.
> I understand PC's, but not anything to do with UNIX, and am a little
> in the dark.
As ObOtherPoster pointed out, windows is more resource demanding. So
if you think this might work on windows, modula user load and whatnot,
it'll probably do fine for most unices. Except that you still have a PC.
> Now I know you will say it depends on traffic, jobs etc, but I really
> only want to know if this is a standard spec for a UNIX server.
Again, I fully agree with ObOtherPoster; there is no single standard
for un*x servers just as there isn't for many other things. And without
knowing more details about the expected load, comp.unix.admin won't be
able to offer much more specific advice, either.
Some things to think of before asking again there are: how many people
will be doing what, exactly? Is there, say, graphics involved, and if
so, will there be client machines to do the bulk of the drawing or is
the server going to do that? Will the server just push some data back
and forth and keep the score, so to say, or will it have to do the
bulk of the work and do the clients just show some results? Lots of
interesting information follows from observing what machine will be
doing what, exactly. Start with the needs, giving you a base for a more
educated guess.
[1] Take the prices of contemporary same-model cpus of varying speeds
and draw them in a simple linear graph. Note anything interesting?
For bonus points, do the same with prices one, and two years back.
[2] Real servers are headless; they don't even have a graphics adapter.
You access them over serial if you have to, or over the network in
all other cases. Their BIOSes support this from the ground up.
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
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| Jeremiah DeWitt Weiner 2005-02-04, 6:01 pm |
| Doug McIntyre <merlyn@geeks.org> wrote:
> Depending on drive I/O you need, I'd
> go with a SCSI drive system rather than SATA for most Unix OSs, but
> thats a cost tradeoff some people make.
In my experience, SATA drives are not reliable in a server role. I
have had bad experiences with both Maxtors and Seagates. To be sure,
these were drives in busy database servers, but that's why I say "in a
server role". Maybe if it's in a very i/o light role you'd be OK, but I
say don't take the chance. If you want a real server, get a real server
and not a glorified PC.
JDW
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