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Grex > Coop13 > #380: Cyberspace Communications finances for November 2006 | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 12 new of 124 responses total. |
scg
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response 113 of 124:
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Jan 7 02:03 UTC 2007 |
My favorite dedicated server hoster is ServePath
(http://www.servepath.com). I designed their network a few years ago,
and they treat me very well. My view that they're doing things right
isn't unbiased. I've also heard good things about RackSpace and
Affinity (http://www.valueweb.com), but I've never actually dealt with
them.
I also wouldn't be so quick to dismiss server virtualization, if you
find a hosting provider you like who is doing that. True, you only get
a fraction of the server's processing power, but the servers will likely
be a lot more powerful than what Grex is running on now. From what I
hear (no direct experience yet), it's hard to tell the difference from a
distance between a real server and a virtual server, and a hosting
provider will probably be far more motivated to avoid or deal quickly
with hardware problems taking down lots of customers' virtual servers
than with issues affecting only a single customer.
How to handle load balancing and failover depends on what you're doing.
Simplest is round robin DNS with a low TTL, perhaps accompanied by a
nanny script that watches to see if one of the servers goes away and
removes its DNS entry. That's what used to be done in the old days
before all those fancy load balancing boxes were invented, and is more
or less what some of the fancy load balancing boxes do.
(What I do at work is to scatter the servers around the world and source
BGP announcements from the servers (google for "anycast"), but that's
not very well suited for what Grex is doing.)
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maus
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response 114 of 124:
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Jan 7 02:17 UTC 2007 |
I need to amend my previous statement. I had forgotten about RackSpace;
they have a good rep. I don't know ServPath or Affinity.
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pfv
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response 115 of 124:
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Jan 7 20:24 UTC 2007 |
I guess I fail to see what all this "powerful" gains anyone.
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maus
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response 116 of 124:
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Feb 14 04:21 UTC 2007 |
While sitting in a hollowed out baseboard and chewing on some wires, I
found an Ultra320 SCSI RAID board in what appears to be new condition.
Do we want me to send it in so that when we reinstall, we can mirror the
root volume on high-speed SCSI drives?
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steve
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response 117 of 124:
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Feb 18 04:20 UTC 2007 |
Do you have documentation for it? Is it hardware only?
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maus
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response 118 of 124:
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Feb 18 05:26 UTC 2007 |
It is pure hardware RAID. I would have to check the make and model
(documentation should be on the mfc's webpage).
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maus
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response 119 of 124:
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Feb 18 06:01 UTC 2007 |
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/scsi_tech/value/ASR-2230SLP/
Mirroring / and /usr on SCSI and /home and /var on Serial ATA would make
a very nice, well-split-up, performant, capacious system.
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steve
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response 120 of 124:
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Feb 18 07:28 UTC 2007 |
Hardware raid is definitely what we want. I will look at this.
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maus
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response 121 of 124:
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Mar 30 02:32 UTC 2007 |
Just curious, I have started seeing 10K RPM Serial ATA drives. Does the
increased rotational speed noticeably improve reading/writing of data?
Is the increase in data access speed a direct function of the rotational
velocity of the center spindle? Presuming it does, is this a real bottle
neck that we would face, or do 7200 RPM drives get to the data fast
enough that choke-points would be elsewhere in the system? I guess my
real question is "would we get benefit enough from 10K RPM drives to
justify the higher cost versus 7200 RPM drives?".
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nharmon
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response 122 of 124:
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Mar 30 11:20 UTC 2007 |
Yes, 10k RPM drives have higher I/O performance than slower spinning
drives. They also tend to have a lower capacity and are more expensive.
The rule of thumb I usually use to calculate I/O performance is:
RPM/100 = iops
That is, RPMs divided by 100 gives you I/Os per second. Of course, I
mainly deal with fiber channel drives so this may be way off. Your
arrangement is as important as your individual disk performance too. A
RAID 10 array is much faster than a RAID 5 array, but sacrifices a lot
of storage space.
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maus
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response 123 of 124:
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Mar 30 15:45 UTC 2007 |
Thanks for the rule of thumb and for confirming what I suspected about
RAID 1+0 vs RAID 5 performance (where I worked, we did not do RAID 5
except on rare occasion, and when we did, they didn't trust the grunts
to set it up or maintain it, so I usually only saw RAID 1, RAID 1+0 or
LVM/concatenated over multiple RAID 1 sets).
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ric
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response 124 of 124:
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May 5 03:51 UTC 2007 |
I've heard that these "perpendicular" drives at 7200 RPM are actually the
fastest for most situations.
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