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Re: Amanda server selection advice
2006-01-31 05:54:30
stan wrote:
I've narrowed the choice of machines down to one of 2 Sun Models. Either a
W2100Z, or a Ultra 40. I plan on using an Ultrim tape drive, and doing
compression on the server, so I need lot's of CPU power, and of course high
I/O throughput.
I was wondering what people thought about this selection?
Is Sun a requirement in your environment? Just asking, as a dual-core
AMD64 would most like be much cheaper, would still give you enough
performance to max out the tape write speed, and runs Solaris x86 quite
nicely from what I hear. Our current backup server is an old dual Athlon
MP 2400+ (running Ubuntu), and *it* has no problem maxing out the tape
I/O from two SATA drives in RAID-0. It does struggle on the server-side
compression though, which is why we're looking at moving to a newer dual
core AMD64.
The W2100Z is a SCSI machine, but I would still add a 2nd SCSI card
dedicated to the tape drive. The Ultra 40 looks like it would have more CPU
power, as the processors are dual core.
If you need / want to stick with Sun hardware, I'd recommend the Ultra
40, as the server side compression will tax whatever CPU power you can
throw at it.
I plan on using Solaris 10, if that matters. Is SATA equal to SCSI for the disk
I/O?
Not equal, per-se, but more recent SATA drives have support for NCQ and
other SCSI-type features, so they're very close. Under many server usage
patterns, high-end 15k+ RPM SCSI drives will still be faster, but for
the kind of I/O workload Amanda does SATA should be more than fast
enough. If you run a holding partition that is striped across two (or
more) SATA disks you will be able to max out your tape's write speed, or
come very close, and you'll be at a tiny fraction of the cost of SCSI.
Graeme
--
Graeme Humphries (graeme.humphries AT vcom DOT com)
(306) 955-7075 ext. 485
My views are not the views of my employers.
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