Quote:
Originally Posted by rup1033
So far I have only donated 10$ towards the PEQ project but I'm poor and have no job at the moment, if I was working I'd totally drop 100 bucks without a thought if it would help make us not disconnect often.
Now the idea of getting a server could be done if every person who plays donates 10 to 100$ you could build a new machine. Perhaps have a thermometer or a donation counter on the server homepage to show how finances are at the time.
A new server PC of 4,000 dollars like I saw mentioned earlier I think is way too much overkill for a small project that is funded from donations and your own pocketbook. You can build a reasonably priced high end desktop PC with a quad core CPU and 8gig of ram and a good quality motherboard , 7200rpm enterprise grade disks with synced spindle speed in raid 1+0 (4 disks with one spare not in the computer so if one fails of a set you can RMA, and rebuild the array with the spare and keep server going), or a raid 5 solution if that's your preference. Don't go too skimpy on the raid card for sure.
IF you were to go with a desktop CPU like an Athlon II x4 3ghz without the shared L3 cache like Phenom or Opteron it would probably look something like
500$ for mainboard chip, and 8gig of corsair xms seris performance ram maybee 100$ for a kvm ip pci card or usb SecureLinx Spider kvm over ip then a raid card ~290$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scrollFullInfo , A thermaltake TPG-750M 87% efficent gold certified 750W psu 180$.
A good place to get a enclosure for it would be http://www.servercase.com/Merchant2/...Code=AdvServer I purchased one of their entry level server cases, for what I believe was 89$ after shipping, solid steel with 8 drive bays 5.25" and one 3.5". Fits my 12x13 extended atx opteron board.
So around 1300-1400$ doing it that route without having purchased the hard disks.
For drives I don't know about the newer velociraptors. I hear the failure rate is pretty high, but my older original raptor disks have been running all day and night and getting beat on for a few years now and are doing well. Perhaps a cheaper 7200rpm disk set for the raid would be best, as long as they have synchronized spindle speed, avoid western digital RE disks I hear they have a horrible failure rate according to newegg reviews. If you really wanted I suppose you could step it up to Serial Attached SCSI the disks in that category are built like a tank generally which I'm sure you know. Their cost is quite a bit more.
That's just my 2cp worth, just making a few suggestions on a sub 2000$ machine. Maybe such a idea cant work out for you but I was bored and sat and wrote it. And I'm sure someone is bored and sat and read it and may have ideas of their own to post. |
We can always go cheaper. The whole point of this plan is to NOT go the cheapest route. As was stated by CD in another thread, I will be providing a the co-lo to put this equipment at my expense. In exchange, I will be running a virtual host on this equipment. Currently, I have that virtual machine running on one of two physical machines so I can move it to the other in the event of a hardware failure. I am not going to give up that redundancy for my own set up. This means it has to be two machines. I do not have the IP space for additional machines without an additional fee per month, which is also not going to happen.
My existing machines do not have the disk IO ability to handle PEQ. They might be a bit light on CPU as well, but it is possible that both could be used in tandem for PEQ if the disk IO problem were addressed. That would require a caching raid card.
The raid cards in our proposal are about $800 each. Sure, we could go cheaper, but then we would not have as much expandability in the future. These raid cards come with 512MB cache memory and are expandable to 4GB cache memory. They optionally have a battery that can be connected to them, which allows the safe use of write caching.
People seem to think that adding more drives in a RAID array always resolves disk IO problems. Just like networking, there are two values to pay attention to with disk IO: throughput and latency. Adding drives improves throughput but does not help latency, and in fact can even hurt latency. Higher spindle speeds and seek times improve latency. Read caching can help some as well if the predictive read ahead logic is good. Write caching can help quite a bit as it allows you to optimize writes to reduce the number of seeks required.
The systems we proposed will have a pair of 147GB 15krpm SAS drives in each. Short of enterprise class SSDs, this is the best we can do. Consumer class SSDs do not have the performance or the reliability we need.
The systems we are getting will be expandable to up to two 6 core xeons and up to 48GB ram. It is currently the cheapest option that I could find that has built in management and the expandability we desired. There are other options up to motherboards that could take up to two 12 core opterons and 256GB ram, but that costs even more than what we already proposed.
Also the suggestion in the quote above does not include any way to power cycle or reset the system. This is a feature that you generally get with more expensive server class motherboards. My current systems have this as well as the ones that are in the proposed setup for PEQ.
Here is the list of components proposed:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...umber=10972134
If you look at the bottom of that list, the subtotal is $4,156.74. Then you have to add for tax and shipping. That comes to $4,587.64. And don't forget that the money we are raising has PayPal fees taken out of it. So this is not a cheap endeavor. But it should be a long term solution, allowing for failures, both software and hardware, and allowing for quite a lot of relatively inexpensive upgrades later if more horsepower is needed.
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