Have a look at the 'Sun Rays' from Sun - they've been around for years; they are cheap and very reliable:
http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients
The prices shown on the Sun site are list-price - we get a Very healthy discount off of this, which brings the prices down even further.
...is really the only resource you need as an entry to management. As they say in the book it should be mandated that all managers read is annually (or anally, if they deserve it).
Can't recommend it enough really - it helped me plenty.
You need to see how you want to access your storage, and what is going to be running on it, as to how you go:-
SAN - block level data access to storage. Good for databases; low client counts (because SAN ports are expensive relative to ethernet) - but with high IO demands. EMC are good, but pricey - a low to mid end Clariion would probably be the right range to aim at.
NAS - file level data access to storage. Good for situations where there are many clients connecting, and their IO demands are not excessive. Netapps filers are very good at this (if youy can find information on their new OS (10GX) then it's VERY interesting. ILM use them in their render farms.
iSCSI - a blend of the best of both, but it's still looked upon as an emerging technology. You get (or did) free iSCSI licenses with netapps filers.
Just a quick reply here... i've been beta testing the T2000 for 2 months now, and recieved our shipment of 13 for production recently (ebay have been buying all that they can get their hands on!).
On the slots, there are 2 PCI-X and 2 PCI-E slots. However at the moment 1 of the PCI-X slots is take up with a SAS disk controller - this controller will be build on to the motherboard in the next hardware update (march to april time), so freeing up the other PCI-X slot.
On the benchmarking front, it's pretty impressive. As long as your tool is multi threaded, or you run many single threaded daemons (eg old Apache), and there's not much floating point ops (check http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/mrbenchmark/20051 207 for more info) it's an absolute screamer - in relative terms we're getting 5 to 7 times the performance of a quad CPU v440.
Very nice boxes... and just wait until the 'Rock' line of CPU's come out.
Cheers.
ps and yes - there's no graphics card! this IS a server after all.
I work with Slidey, but in the Solutions side of the team (i'm the guy who architects the infrastructure of the platform). Here's a few additions:
1. Storage - \Disks, lots of Disks\ - we use EMC DMX3000's for the stateful machines (~180TB raw) which work very nicely.
Your back end needs to handle lots of small random writes - this makes storage vendors cringe when mentioned, as it makes a mockery of their lovely benchmarks.
2. Clustering - you'll need that also on your master directory and message stores's. Veritas is nice.
3. Load balancing - For the front end boxes (pop, imap, web). Cisco CSS's are pretty good for this.
4. OS - We run Solaris. It might not be the fastest thing around, but it works pretty much non-stop; has good vendor support and is very mature. RedHat might be on the horizon as well as Solaris for x86. Windows? don't be daft.
5. Test environment. Have a scaled down exact copy of the production system to test things on. i can't stress how important this is.
6. Proper automated server build procedure. One word - Jumpstart. All OS and application configs and builds in Jumpstart. So if you loose a box, it's no big deal about rebuilding it at 3am on Saturday morning when you've had a bevvy or two the night before, and all you feel like doing is chundering (i speak from experience - a SunFire 6800 does not respond well to projectile vomit)
One correction of Slideys post, we now have 16 brightmail boxes (10 in, 6 out) and it's not enough.
My god, i thought i was the only person who remembered TV Offal... was one of the funniest shows i ever saw, especially it was on when i was a (drunk) student...
I'll never forget the "don't love me for fun girl" Boyz Zone 'cover...
Therus
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look at the 'Sun Rays' from Sun - they've been around for years; they are cheap and very reliable: http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients The prices shown on the Sun site are list-price - we get a Very healthy discount off of this, which brings the prices down even further.
Can't recommend it enough really - it helped me plenty.
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projec ts-Tom-DeMarco/dp/0932633439
You need to see how you want to access your storage, and what is going to be running on it, as to how you go:-
SAN - block level data access to storage. Good for databases; low client counts (because SAN ports are expensive relative to ethernet) - but with high IO demands. EMC are good, but pricey - a low to mid end Clariion would probably be the right range to aim at.
NAS - file level data access to storage. Good for situations where there are many clients connecting, and their IO demands are not excessive. Netapps filers are very good at this (if youy can find information on their new OS (10GX) then it's VERY interesting. ILM use them in their render farms.
iSCSI - a blend of the best of both, but it's still looked upon as an emerging technology. You get (or did) free iSCSI licenses with netapps filers.
O'Reilly have a good book on this. "Using SAN's and NAS" which is vendor agnostic http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sansnas/index.html
Just a quick reply here... i've been beta testing the T2000 for 2 months now, and recieved our shipment of 13 for production recently (ebay have been buying all that they can get their hands on!). On the slots, there are 2 PCI-X and 2 PCI-E slots. However at the moment 1 of the PCI-X slots is take up with a SAS disk controller - this controller will be build on to the motherboard in the next hardware update (march to april time), so freeing up the other PCI-X slot. On the benchmarking front, it's pretty impressive. As long as your tool is multi threaded, or you run many single threaded daemons (eg old Apache), and there's not much floating point ops (check http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/mrbenchmark/20051 207 for more info) it's an absolute screamer - in relative terms we're getting 5 to 7 times the performance of a quad CPU v440.
Very nice boxes... and just wait until the 'Rock' line of CPU's come out.
Cheers.
ps and yes - there's no graphics card! this IS a server after all.
1. Storage - \Disks, lots of Disks\ - we use EMC DMX3000's for the stateful machines (~180TB raw) which work very nicely.
Your back end needs to handle lots of small random writes - this makes storage vendors cringe when mentioned, as it makes a mockery of their lovely benchmarks.
2. Clustering - you'll need that also on your master directory and message stores's. Veritas is nice.
3. Load balancing - For the front end boxes (pop, imap, web). Cisco CSS's are pretty good for this.
4. OS - We run Solaris. It might not be the fastest thing around, but it works pretty much non-stop; has good vendor support and is very mature. RedHat might be on the horizon as well as Solaris for x86. Windows? don't be daft.
5. Test environment. Have a scaled down exact copy of the production system to test things on. i can't stress how important this is.
6. Proper automated server build procedure. One word - Jumpstart. All OS and application configs and builds in Jumpstart. So if you loose a box, it's no big deal about rebuilding it at 3am on Saturday morning when you've had a bevvy or two the night before, and all you feel like doing is chundering (i speak from experience - a SunFire 6800 does not respond well to projectile vomit)
One correction of Slideys post, we now have 16 brightmail boxes (10 in, 6 out) and it's not enough.
Cheers.
i'd hat to see what British Telecom comes out with when this (eventually) hit's the UK.
My god, i thought i was the only person who remembered TV Offal... was one of the funniest shows i ever saw, especially it was on when i was a (drunk) student... I'll never forget the "don't love me for fun girl" Boyz Zone 'cover... Therus