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

Biggest troll ever?

[WasterDave]

Either this is the biggest troll ever, or you're deeply in the shit. Assuming it's the latter, for now, I shall toss my orb and see where it lands:

*HIRE A REALLY GOOD SYSADMIN*

You're horrendously out of your depth and there are shedloads of really good sysadmins around who need jobs. Take someone on for three months to look at the problem properly. Advice 2:

*DON'T BUY AN ITANIUM MACHINE*

There is simply no point, particularly if you don't really know what you're going to use it for.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Feasibility Study...

[shaka999]

Your missing one metric which my company has found to be the most important!

QUALITY!

Because of the reduced price and increased performance of our DELL XEON boxes we are able to run more simulations on our circuits. This allows us to check a greater range of operating conditions thus improving the overall quality of our product.