[Solved] Recommendation on Server Configuration

solamour · Last edited by solamour on Wed May 23, 2012 8:59 pm; edited 1 time in total

I believe it has little to do with Gentoo installation, but I'm not sure where to turn to, so here it is.

Long story short, I ended up with a build server configuration role. The server is for an embedded software project, which consists of hundreds of thousands files, and the team is about a dozen engineers or so. Not thinking too deeply, I ended up getting a dual Xeon X5690 (6 physical cores each, total 12 physical cores, and OS sees 24 cores), 24GB RAM, and SAS 3.5" 15K RPM 600GB disks (8 of them, total about 4TB). A full build from scratch took less than a half hour, which was a great improvement from the old system, so everyone was happy.

Then the team grew, and we ran out of disk space, so I bought another server with pretty much the same configuration. Perhaps I should have spent a little more time anticipating future expansion, but well, submitting a purchase request in a corporate environment isn't exactly just filling out a form, so I took an easy way out and recycled the old quote from the server vendor. That lasted a while until I had to get more servers, so the dinky lab is now filled with 4 beasts, and I might need to get more before people start kicking and screaming.

The only reason I went with 3.5" 15K RPM disks was everyone wanted faster disks (I could have gotten bigger disks had I chosen 10K RPM), and 2.5" 15K RPM maxed out at 300GB only. The server has 8 disk slots, so I can't add more disks even if I want to. I tried a network attached storage, but even with a gigabit switch, the build time took a lot longer than doing it locally. I'd like to hear experts' opinion on what my options are for expanding disk space other than keep filling the room with huge machines.
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sol

honp · Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 2:23 pm Post subject:

I would say, that you have a few ways how to do it. One is NAS, the second is SAN, third is change of disks.

If 1GB/s network is not fast enough for you, try 10GB. Or different protocol. NFS? CIFS?

FC attached storage? iSCSI? Infiniband?

Or buy slower 2-3TB disks and if they are not fast enough, implement raid...

H.

solamour · Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 8:58 pm Post subject:

I ended up getting another server, because although bigger disk space is always great to have, when more people are added to the existing server, the build performance would degrade anyway, which will result in kicking and screaming from the team members. I'll have to consider a long term expandability (NAS, SAN, etc) soon, though. Thanks everyone for taking time to respond.
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sol