How hard can it be to slide a few servers into a cabinet? Took pretty much the entire day to rack up a UPS, X-Raid, and three X-Serves into an XRackPro2. From top to bottom, the J-School’s existing web server, fairly new streaming media server, brand new directory server/RAID controller, and 1.4 TB RAID-4 student/faculty storage system. Haven’t yet configured the RAID or directory server — will be working on that in the coming weeks. Huge leap forward – this half-height cabinet replaces a wall full of mostly x86/Windows servers.
Music: Brian Wilson :: Vega-Tables
Will you be running Linux or Tiger Server?
Linux might be a better choice given the results of this Anandtech article:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436
Hey Vic – That article is obsessed with speed-only benchmarking. Starts off with “This article cares about speed, performance, and nothing else! No comments on how well designed the internals are, no elaborate discussions about user friendliness, out-of-the-box experience and other subjective subjects.” User-friendly Unix is what it’s all about for us – the reason we’re making this change. We’re Apple Technology Partners. We’re doing all of this because of Mac OS X. Our sysadmin doesn’t have Linux experience. The J-School will be 100% OS X by the end of summer. And speed? We’ve got speed coming out of our ears. Even the older web + database server has vastly more speed than we’ve ever needed — not a concern. We’re buying a solution, not a number crunching cluster :).
And aside from that, the anandtech article might not be worth the bits it was written in…
http://kernelthread.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=148
That looks great, color me jealous.