What hardware setup do we need for our purposes?

[rogerzebra]

Hi all,
Again, I would appreciate if someone with a server setup experience/background can point me in a direction or were to go to meet our needs, regarding hardware setup. We are working on a CMS system using PHP and MySQL on a Apache webserver which will be a local setup. We are today 7 employees at the office and plan to run this system for another 10 in a year from now. So, we are looking at approximately 20 to 25 users as a total.
We have already decide to go with a Windows 3000 server environment but we are not sure what type of hardware setup we need for our purposes.

So, the questions is what do we need to run a safe and efficient environment which suits our needs? How many harddrives do we need for our purposes? Do we need to run RAID discs? How do they work? Please explain RAID 0+1 stripped/mirrored?
Should we go with 2 processors? Do we need to separate the server our webpage is on?

All inputs on this subject is valuable for us and much apprecited.
/rz

 

[rac2]

I am not a system administrator, what I know I picked up from hanging around an ISP shop and a few years on the edge of dp management.

However, I think it will be a few years before Windows 3000 is released.

PHP, MySQL, and Apache generally speaking run on Unix, or Unix-like operating systems. They are available for Windows but why would you do that? Either you have Unix skills or Windows skills. Or minimal skills, in which case you might want to use IIS, if indeed your operating system is Windows. Though PHP and MySQL will certainly be cheaper than .NET and SQL Server.

Twenty-five users is not terribly demanding on modern machines; PHP and MySQL will be fine.

Twenty-five users is not terribly demanding on modern machines; one server for both web and database with one processor should be OK, but if you have the cash, why not get two processors. Two servers would not be fine too; again if you have the capital, why not.

RAID provides real-time protection agains disk failure. Your disk drives will fail. This is one thing you can be certain about. How will you deal with this? Regular, automated backups, for sure. This will protect you against loss of data except for the work you did since the last backup. Which was probably last night. RAID protects you against loss of data since the last transaction. So it is a cost-benefit isssue. Again, I can assure you that your disk drives will fail. So how critical is your data?

RAID mirror is just that, two copies. RAID striping is a clever scheme that requires less than twice the storage to achieve 100% recovery of data when one drive fails. Dont know the details but for humonguous datasets higher levels of RAID will be cheaper.

Hope you get a reply from a sys admin also. Just thought my semi-informed perspective might help clarify the situation.

 

[lgarner]

Raid 0 is striped, data spans multiple drives and there is no redundancy.
Raid 1 is mirrored, a copy of all data is kept on two drives.

Rad 0+1 (or 1+0, I'm never sure) is mirrored strip sets. So, if you have 10 drives, you would create two Raid0 sets of 5 each, then mirror those sets. Generally this is the best combination of performance and resiliency. Raid5 is a cost-efficient compromise, where for N drives you get N-1 storage. A slight performance hit compared to Raid0, but costs a lot less than Raid1 and is resiliant.

How much hardware really depends on the load, which depends on the application. I wouldn't think that 25 users would stress it too much, but it can happen. I have an app that performs statistical analysis in the MySQL queries; the quad-proc DB server with 12gb RAM really gets loaded for a few seconds on some tables. I'd expect a CMS system to be less intensive.

 

[rogerzebra]

Thank you guys for valuable information.
rac2, win 3000 has been out for a while. Apache is more safe than IIS. So we have already choosed to go with Apache.

Igarner thanks for your detailed explanation I really appreciate it. I still though have a question regarding the N drives you mentioning. N drives gives you get N-1 storage? Is that how the Raid 5 storage the data? And what's the cost to go with a Raid5 solution?

Thanks again both for your efforts?

 

[lgarner]

A pretty good depiction of the different RAID types is at

http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/architecture/Raid/basicRAID.html.

The basic cost for RAID 5 is the RAID controller and at least 3 disks. My preference is to buy the server pre-built with what I need, like a Dell 2850 for your needs. It supports up to 5 drives, which would be good: 2 mirrored OS drives and 3 RAID5 data drives. Or, you could add a Powervault external array if you need more. I have several of these and they work just fine.

 

[rogerzebra]

Igarner,
you are my hero again.
thank you