The only good thing intel has going for them is price. If you want expandability, just plan on being able to throw a few more boxes into the load balancing pool when you get big enough to warrant more horsepower. You want reliability? I bet it would be far cheaper to assemble two identical mid-range machines and have one sit around as a hot standby. A simple shell script to have it check the other machine and assume it's IP address if there's a problem would be pretty simple. Even with that configuration you still have multiple single points of failure (motherboard, NIC, cabling). You'd be far better off getting 2 smaller machines and finding some way to have one mirror and monitor the other. That way everything in Box A you have in Box B, if there's a hardware problem in A you just fall back to B. You can lose anything in A and still be able to have your site going. And with those 2 machines you still have a good build-out process for when you get bigger. You have Box B doing backups so it doesn't suck CPU off Box A needlessly. Maybe a little later you move the RAID over to B and keep A just doing www, or maybe have A do www but B does database stuff, you get the idea. Eventually you'll get to the point where you can't split services off to another box anymore and you'll need to move to some sort of load balancing. There's no intel machine that's powerful enough to be able to serve your site off of 1 server forever, so why bother trying to do it? The intel philosophy is when you start seeing bottlenecks you just throw some more cheap machines at it. Adam Maloney Systems Administrator Sihope Communications On Tue, 19 Sep 2000 Nick.T.Reinking at supervalu.com wrote: > A Sun box running Solaris (with that kind of power) will cost > me much more than what I can afford. That box is only $3500, > which will of course go down over a couple of months. > > Don't tell me that I can get a Sun E250, with that kind of disk > and memory for $3500. :P > > The reason why I'm going with that machine is that I want both > expandability (if I need it), plus reliablitity. If the site gets big, > I don't want to be down for 3 days because of a hardware failure. :( > > BTW, /. has I believe, 6 boxes (that was one year ago), with > a load balancer. Certainly a lot more than I have. :P > > Nick > > > > > > jethro at freakzilla.com, on 09/19/2000 03:33:10 PM > To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org @ PMDF > cc: > Subject: Re: [TCLUG:21429] Server recommendations > > Hi, > > On Tue, 19 Sep 2000 Nick.T.Reinking at supervalu.com wrote: > > > Greetings, all, I'm looking to build a server for an e-commerce > > company that I'm thinking about starting up. Sadly, as I don't > > have much experience running Linux on "high-end" machines, > > > Sun. Sparc. Solaris. > > > -Yaron > > -- > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org > For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org