What Goes into an Enterprise Network?

Komi asks: "I work for a big semiconductor company, and I'm part of a group that is spear heading the Linux movement here. Right now everyone uses Sun machines to design, but you can get a cheaper Linux x86 machine that is four times faster. So it is my job to prove that Linux works. The problem is that I'm an analog circuit designer stuck in the role of sysadmin. So I need some advice on what goes into a network. It won't be that large right now, but it has to be scalable for up to a couple of hundred machines. If this works, then hopefully we'll convince all designers at my company to make the switch."

"Here's the hardware that I am planning on getting:

• 2 servers:
  
  These would hold the home accounts and tools, as well as serve out NIS, NTP, etc. I know I'll need a lot of hard drive space (2x72GB SCSI each), but do I need a lot of memory? (It's 4GB RDRAM max.) Should the processor be fast, or dual?
  
  
• 3 batch machines:
  
  These would be a small compute farm running LFS or something. Jobs would get queued up and run continuously. So these should be dual CPU with lots of memory, probably 4GB each. Any other particular details?
  
  
• 10 desktop machines:
  
  These would be on the designers and developers desktops. These should be reasonably fast (~2GHz) single CPU machines with probably need at least 2 GB RAM. The simulations we run do not benefit from dual CPUs. They probably don't even need SCSI. I'm thinking a $2k PC should work.
  
  
• 1 Itanium server:
  
  This would be to play around on to test our 64-bit applications. The only advantage of 64-bit is applications using huge amounts of data.

We plan to run Red Hat 8.0 on these machines. Is there anything I'm missing? I don't have much redundancy in the servers. I plan to do backups to DVDs. Is this asking for trouble? Any further advice would be appreciated."

Comments

What Goes into an Enterprise Network?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Goes into an Enterprise Network?

Dilithium?

Re:What Goes into an Enterprise Network?

[Keith Russell]

Isolinear chips. Lots of them. All over the ship. Even in places where a teenager intoxicated by a recycled plot device (cough!) can get to them and sabotage the ship. Hence the importance of locking the server room.

The BIG Never in Enterprise Networks

[Inexile2002]

Never let Captain Kirk talk to the main computer. Every damn time he does he tricks it into self destructing. You'd think he doesn't want the Enterprise to have a network...

DAMMIT Jim! I'm a Doctor not a UNIX admin!

"analog circuit designer...sysadmin"

[duplicate-nickname]

LOL...these are the type of people Windows admins have been putting up with for years, and now you *nix guys can start dealing with them.

"Hi, I was a desktop support tech, now I have been thrown into the job of managing our Windows network, how do I install that Active Directory thing?"

Windows has had the burnden of bad, inexperienced sysadmins for years, now Linux can share in the joy as it's more widely deployed.