Everything is relative. I bet those systems keeping track of your bank account are mission critical to someone. For the shareholders of the bank at least. And they would be for me, if a failure in them prevented me from receiving my salary and i couldnt feed my daughter or pay mortgage.;)
For external ide storage with scsi interface I've had just good experiences buying from http://www.raidking.com . They even shipped boxes to Europe for us. They have a full line of scsi hardware, that FYI is rebranded, so you may find the same hardware in other places. But at least you will be able to gather solid information from their website. Their service was awesome though, and you could hardly do better than sticking with them. For high end hardware (scsi and/or fibre everywhere) i have been a http://www.dothill.com customer for years, but that is another story.
These Perc controllers are integrated on the hardware it seems and need special drivers that may interact in some weird way with some parts of the operating system. That is why i stay way of internal raid cards. I always try to go for external storage with its own embedded intelligence, and these plug to the servers using standard scsi or fibre adapters. This brings some added advantages to us. In low end servers i can use external scsi raid boxes with ide disks, with a very low cost per MB, and very good reliability. I can make the servers boot easily from the raid boxes with no dependency on special storage drivers. I can exchange servers in a snap if they break or if i want to upgrade, the new server just needs to have the same scsi card, and with Linux the rest is piece of cake. And with the cost for storage with more than one host channel going down, i can plug more than one server to the same storage, both sharing filesystems (Gfs) or raid logical disks.
Five servers for a "mere" 6000 people? It doesn't sound much. Some people actually do work you know? What kind of workload is on these servers? Is the workload distributed? Concentrated when during the day? Are these servers you mention all doing the same thing, databases? If your 6000 people put the workload on the servers my 60 or so use to, five servers would be way too little.
Correction: The graphics/sound/nic are generally integrated in the chipset, and they are... NOT... fast, even if you look only at these cpu's clock rates.
If you want to get a top machine, you are going to have to live with the noise. You can quiet it down a little if you pick the right components like i did - a good solid case, a special cpu fan and heat dissipator, a fanless graphic card, and hard disk noise insulators. But this is going to cost you $$$. Otherwise go for VIA C3 cpu based machines. These cpu's have low power consumption and low heat dissipation. But the old adage also applies here, you loose something with it. The graphics/sound/nic are generally integrated in the chipset, and they are fast, even if you look only at these cpu's clock rates.
Like the original poster, i too use InoculateIT in my personal machine, and have been warned at update time that in May Computer Associates will stop supporting the product. It is a very lightweight anti-virus, with a simple and effective interface (is it me or aren't there getting so cheesy these days), that doesn't get in the way of work, and doesn't try to be everything to everybody and the same time. And guess what, it is also free. Practical alternatives nowadays, even non-free ones, are little to none. So one of these days, in one of my intellectual honesty attacks, i hatched up something it may end up being a radical idea: if this is such a great product, why can't i just upgrade to the e-trust version they are offering now? It has the same charm as InoculateIT, and the price is a little less than $10 each year. I mean, we all love free software and all, but i spend almost that each time i go out with my wife and daughter and we want to sit down have a coffee or whatever. $10 for peace of mind? It is as much as free. So you may ask, why haven't i upgraded yet? Well... i am waiting for May. That way i get a couple months extra on yearly updates.;-)
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File encription is very easy with several products. But what key management? And what about email? That is where these products fail.
/Pedro
Not in your wildest dreams. PGP Desktop was as easy as it gets.
/Pedro
Everything is relative. I bet those systems keeping track of your bank account are mission critical to someone. For the shareholders of the bank at least. And they would be for me, if a failure in them prevented me from receiving my salary and i couldnt feed my daughter or pay mortgage. ;)
/Pedro
... when i checked it out. The chance of seeing such a product go away with not even a bang makes me sad. Has anyone tried it in production?
/Pedro
For external ide storage with scsi interface I've had just good experiences buying from http://www.raidking.com . They even shipped boxes to Europe for us. They have a full line of scsi hardware, that FYI is rebranded, so you may find the same hardware in other places. But at least you will be able to gather solid information from their website. Their service was awesome though, and you could hardly do better than sticking with them. For high end hardware (scsi and/or fibre everywhere) i have been a http://www.dothill.com customer for years, but that is another story.
/Pedro
These Perc controllers are integrated on the hardware it seems and need special drivers that may interact in some weird way with some parts of the operating system. That is why i stay way of internal raid cards. I always try to go for external storage with its own embedded intelligence, and these plug to the servers using standard scsi or fibre adapters. This brings some added advantages to us. In low end servers i can use external scsi raid boxes with ide disks, with a very low cost per MB, and very good reliability. I can make the servers boot easily from the raid boxes with no dependency on special storage drivers. I can exchange servers in a snap if they break or if i want to upgrade, the new server just needs to have the same scsi card, and with Linux the rest is piece of cake. And with the cost for storage with more than one host channel going down, i can plug more than one server to the same storage, both sharing filesystems (Gfs) or raid logical disks.
/Pedro
Five servers for a "mere" 6000 people? It doesn't sound much. Some people actually do work you know? What kind of workload is on these servers? Is the workload distributed? Concentrated when during the day? Are these servers you mention all doing the same thing, databases? If your 6000 people put the workload on the servers my 60 or so use to, five servers would be way too little.
/Pedro
And the cost?
/Pedro
Correction: The graphics/sound/nic are generally integrated in the chipset, and they are ... NOT ... fast, even if you look only at these cpu's clock rates.
/Pedro
If you want to get a top machine, you are going to have to live with the noise. You can quiet it down a little if you pick the right components like i did - a good solid case, a special cpu fan and heat dissipator, a fanless graphic card, and hard disk noise insulators. But this is going to cost you $$$. Otherwise go for VIA C3 cpu based machines. These cpu's have low power consumption and low heat dissipation. But the old adage also applies here, you loose something with it. The graphics/sound/nic are generally integrated in the chipset, and they are fast, even if you look only at these cpu's clock rates.
/Pedro
http://www.ipgpp.com/ for the lazy among you. PGP 6.5.8ckt Build 06 is the last version, i believe.
/Pedro
Yes, but the upgrade cost for current InoculateIT Personal Edition users is just $9.95 yearly.
/Pedro
Free version of f-secure? Unless you still use Windows 3.1x, you are out of luck.
/Pedro
Like the original poster, i too use InoculateIT in my personal machine, and have been warned at update time that in May Computer Associates will stop supporting the product. It is a very lightweight anti-virus, with a simple and effective interface (is it me or aren't there getting so cheesy these days), that doesn't get in the way of work, and doesn't try to be everything to everybody and the same time. And guess what, it is also free. Practical alternatives nowadays, even non-free ones, are little to none. So one of these days, in one of my intellectual honesty attacks, i hatched up something it may end up being a radical idea: if this is such a great product, why can't i just upgrade to the e-trust version they are offering now? It has the same charm as InoculateIT, and the price is a little less than $10 each year. I mean, we all love free software and all, but i spend almost that each time i go out with my wife and daughter and we want to sit down have a coffee or whatever. $10 for peace of mind? It is as much as free. So you may ask, why haven't i upgraded yet? Well ... i am waiting for May. That way i get a couple months extra on yearly updates. ;-)
/Pedro
Could it be it uses imperial, not metric measures? Two pounds of UDP packets, one pound of icmp unreachable packets ... you get the idea.
/Pedro