P4 Motherboard for File Server

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Jeff Vian wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 08:51, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
>> On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Nifty Hat Mitch wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I don't know why your requirements are so high.. I'm running a P3 300Mhz
>>>> 512 MB Ram as a file-server.
>>>>
>>>> 600GB IDE Storage
>>>
>>> I wondered too.
>>
>> If you want to get over ~60MB/s agregate via nfs your server is going to
>> need a faster connection between you disk controllers, processor and your
>> NIC's than 32bit 33mhz pci.
>>
>
> ~60MB/s sounds like enough to saturate 40 T1 links, and definitely would
> likely require multiple gigabit LAN as well as massive switches and
> routers.

60MB/s is 480Mb/s and that's nothing for a high-end nfs server.

> It would seem better to me to use a SAN storage unit with fibre channel
> rather than a pc file server on a LAN for that massive throughput. NFS
> will be a major bottleneck here.

Unless you have some kind of funky namespace mananger, access to san 
filesystmes is at the block level, access to filesystems via nfs is at the 
fs level and can thuse be shared. beyond that gigabit ethernet hardware is 
simply a hell of a lot cheaper than fibre channel.

> In any case, for that throughput it definitely requires a server class
> system.

yes

>> At this point, your IO requirements tend to drive motherboard choice,
>> which in turn drives processor selection. If you need more than 2 x Gb ethernet
>> or more than 4 pci-x slots for controllers and additional nics then
>> obviously your number of choices narrows quite a bit.
>>
>>> A file server only needs to have disks that match the
>>> wire speed.  While he specified multiple network links
>>> he did not specify the speed of those links.
>>>
>>> How many clients, what type of service NFS, samba, ftp, http, squid???
>>> Lots of things qualify as file serving today.
>>>
>>> An rsync host does demand extra CPU if the client load is high.
>>>
>>> One comment is that a reliable mother board is likely one that has one
>>> notch down: CPU, IO and memory installed and two notch up fan/ cooling.
>>> Keep those disks cool....
>>>
>>> Do some measurements... and analysis.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
>> GPG Key Fingerprint:     5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2
>
>

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu 
GPG Key Fingerprint:     5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2