March 16, 2004 at 5:36 pm
Hi,
Here's the deal. We bought a new server and retired a couple of older servers. Our organization does not have a test bed. Currently we have 3+ developers wreaking havoc on my systems. So we are going to build a separate test area and lock them out of production.
I have two retired servers, either would do the job but I ask which is best. Whichever server is not used as the test bed will become a server moved to another site used to receive logs shipped from our production GUI server (500+ users, lightweight back-end databases for 24x7 callcenter and some 5x12 call centers) to provide site redundancy in case of a site emergency. (Production will soon be a fail over cluster as well)
The two servers are both Compaqs.
Config A:
Compaq proliant 8000, 4X700mhz Xeon processors, 2gb ram about 80 gb in RAID for storage
Config B:
Former NAS box, not sure of the model, 2x1ghz processors, 1 gb RAM about 300 GB available. It has a scaled down version of Win2k (and can only have) b/c it is designed to be a NAS box. Note that the RAM is not swappable in between the boxes.
I'm torn on the two. In a quick test of installing SP3a, Config A finished well ahead of B. Yet the disk space offered by B is really attractive when you consider we have a large data warehouse. Also B would be found to be slow to the users if we ever have to use it. (yet I'm not sure I'll be around in the event of a site emergency to switch over) Yet the test area will be heavily used by our developers (we have more coming on later) who could use the extra horsepower - so I'm tempted to offer them the most horsepower. I will be conducting further testing in actual database operations, but am really torn on where to put my horsepower.
What would you do?
Chris.
Chris.
March 19, 2004 at 8:00 am
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March 19, 2004 at 2:31 pm
I'd favour box A for the SQL test bed. If you are going to use per server licencing though A is more expensive though. The developers will appreciate the extra power.
Francis
March 19, 2004 at 2:44 pm
I'd go with A as well. I'm guessing you could very cheaply add Hard disk space to A if you find the need. You also want the development server ot be as close to production server as possible so you can get decent baselines for application performance.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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March 19, 2004 at 3:49 pm
Personal Opinions here.
Make B the development sever, the reason being you want the box that will so the greatest design deffects the slower procs and this also forces them to make better design decisions (hopefully anyway). I would just partition the drive to force them to 80gb of space like the other. Then documentation and other bits can be in the other partition.
As for A I suggest using it for QA. Always have someplace for users to test product before rolling into a production area.
Again my opinion and reason why B over A for dev.
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