Re: hardware/optimizations for a download-webserver
On Jul 16, 2004, at 8:28 PM, Russell Coker wrote:
Installing a single machine and hoping for the best often gives better
results.
I agree in most cases.
One possible better solution that is one step short of creating a
cluster is installing a single machine, and making sure that rock-solid
bare-metal backups happen regularly and that an identical "offline"
machine is available on a few minutes notice if the site is manned
24/7, and available on a PRE-agreed-to timeframe (including downtime)
at a dark site.
The hard part about the above is people try to skip the step of buying
the IDENTICAL hardware for the standby machine and then scramble to
reconfigure or fight with other hardware issues when they swing to the
machine manually.
Other good ways to do this include a shared RAID'ed network filesystem
on a central box and two front-end boxes that are load-balanced with a
hardware load-balancer. That gets into the "must be up 24/7" realm, or
close to it. I worked on an environment that did this with a hardware
NFS server (NetApp) and the front-ends could be up or down, it just
didn't matter... as long as enough of them were up to handle the
current load.
But I have a feeling judging by the original poster's file sizes and
traffic load, that his machine is probably not a required 24/7 uptime
type system.
It's fun to design systems like that, though. Quite a good mental
exercise thinking of all the possible points of failure and
communicating them to those who have to make the money/redundancy-level
decisions.
--
Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com
Reply to: