explane/ help me spec a server.

hargi

hargi

hargi

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19 Jul 2006
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Im looking to spec a server to run moodle on and maybe mahara for student portfolios for 500 users each having about 1 gig of space each.

Im looking at a IBM x3650 7979 quad-core xeon e5410 2.33 GHZ as this supports raid 5.

This is my first server that i have had to spec and would like to know how you would go about it.

This server has 6 bays how would i set these up. would i have one with just the opperating system on mirrored to another drive? and then 3 of the others set for data with raid 5 to the last remaining drive?

How would this be backed up?

TIA
 
I have no idea what moodle or mahara are.
However, for raid 5 you need at least 3 disks. The total capacity of your storage is:
total disks - 1 disk. So if you have 4 disk @ 500gb each, 1 is used for parity leaving 3 disks (approx. 1.5tb) of useable data.
You don't really need to separate your OS from you data and raid each set. I'm not even sure if you have 2 raid setups on a single system.
Raid 5 the lot as a whole, but separate your OS onto a different volume/partition.

For backup, add a tape drive or an external drive which can be removed from site for safe storage.
 
so i could just fill up all the bays 6. and in effect have 5 disks and the other as the RAID5.
as for budget I dont know I think we will have to go down the tape route
 
basically yes.
As for budget, your cheapest option depends on how much data is stored and how much new data is produced daily.
If its not too big an amount, consider using an external usb/esata hdd backing up onto that every night and taking it off-site with you. Or even have 2 or more of these in rotation. That way they can be plugged into any pc and data taken off it. Can't do that with a tape.
Thing is, backup is slow unless you have a tape drive that backs up at 1.5GB/min like ours. :)
 
Last edited:
k.Jacko said:
I have no idea what moodle or mahara are.
However, for raid 5 you need at least 3 disks. The total capacity of your storage is:
total disks - 1 disk. So if you have 4 disk @ 500gb each, 1 is used for parity leaving 3 disks (approx. 1.5tb) of useable data.
You don't really need to separate your OS from you data and raid each set. I'm not even sure if you have 2 raid setups on a single system.
Raid 5 the lot as a whole, but separate your OS onto a different volume/partition.

For backup, add a tape drive or an external drive which can be removed from site for safe storage.
Click to expand...

Course you can have two RAID setups, I wouldn't put data and OS on the same RAID volume for business use myself. Mirrored drives for the OS and whatever else you need for data...
 
Moodle doesnt require that much processing power tbh.
Although with the prices of quad cores now, it'd be foolish not to go Quad.
 
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