20050304: equipment RFP: assistance with hardware requirement

>From: Jeff Trapp <address@hidden>
>Organization: Purdue
>Keywords: 200503041554.j24FsHv2021427 equipment

Hi Jeff,

>We're in the process of writing a proposal for a weather-data server 
>and processor at Purdue.   I've been working with the IT folks here who 
>understand our current setup, and their recommendation is a Dell Power 
>Edge 2850, as configured below.   One of our plans is to begin 
>streaming more images & products (especially radar-related) outside the 
>Purdue domain.

I am curious about what you mean by "streaming more images..."

>We currently don't have the capacity to do this using 
>our current departmental server.
>
>Any suggestions you can make would be appreciated.

The list of hardware you provide looks good, but the cost looks high.
The only comment I would like to make is that the UPC is moving towards
64-bit systems, and Xeons are 32-bit.

A machine you do well to use for comparison to the Dell PowerEdge 2850
is the Sun V20Z.  We now have 5 of these 2U rack mounted servers in house
and love their LDM performance when running Fedora Core 3 64-bit
Linux.

The configuration of the V20Zs we have is:

dual 2 Ghz Opteron
4 GB RAM
dual 72 GB 10K RPM SCSI (I am not positive on the disk space here)
cost of $3000 under an educational discount program that has now ended

We ran a comparative test of Operating Systems to benchmark LDM/IDD
performance on identical servers.  The list of OSes we tried were:

FreeBSD 5.3
Solaris x86 10
Fedora Core 3 64-bit Linux

The _clear_ winner in our testing was FC3, with FreeBSD 5.3 coming in
second and Solaris x86 10 a distant third.  We had unexpected system
crashes under FreeBSD 5.3, so we recently (last Friday) upgraded that
machine to FC3.  Our test Solaris x86 10 machine was upgraded to FC3
about a week earlier.

We are using the V20Zs in a cluster configuration that is accessible to
the community currently as both idd.unidata.ucar.edu and
thelma.ucar.edu.  In this cluster setup, there are two machines that
act as 'director's of LDM requests to data backend servers that send
data to downstream nodes.  This setup allows us to add/remove data back
end nodes as needed to support however many data requests that we need
to service (and to do software and hardware updates).  One stress test
that we ran demonstrated that we could feed 50% more downstream
connections on one of the V20Zs than the 4 processor SPARC version of
thelma.ucar.edu that has been serving the community for almost two
years now.  We now feel that our cluster setup can service literally
all idd data connections that exist in the world; this makes it a great
failover site.

I must add that the V20Z does _not_ perform as a workstation since it
video support is _bad_.  It works great as a data relay, and since you
specfically mention that you are looking for a machine for "streaming"
purposes, I felt that sending along the info on the V20Z was in order.

>Many thanks,

No worries.

>PowerEdge 2850:
>-------------------------
>Intel Xeon dual processor at 3.6GHz/2MB Cache, 800MHz FSB
>4GB DDR2 400MHz (4X1GB), Single Ranked DIMMs
>Riser with PCI-X Support and Embedded Raid (ROMB) Support
>4 x 300GB 10K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI Hard Drive
>Drives attached to PERC4/DC card, RAID 5
>PERC4eDC-PCI Express, 128MB Cache, 2-Internal Channels
>2+4 Split Backplane Daughtercard
>24X IDE CD-RW/DVD ROM Drive for PowerEdge Servers, All OS
>1.44MB Floppy Drive
>Dual On-Board NICs
>Rack Chassis w/Rapid Rails for Dell, HPQ or other Square Hole Racks, 
>PE2850
>
>With a university discount, the estimated cost is $9,661.80.
>******************

>########################################################
>Dr. Robert J. Trapp
>Associate Professor
>Purdue University
>Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
>550 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN  47906-2051
>PH:  765-496-6661              |       FAX:  765-496-1210
>http://www.purdue.edu/eas/severe/

Cheers,

Tom Yoksas
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