Setting up a Small Server Room

[Digimer]

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On 11/21/2011 12:47 PM, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> I've been asked to collaborate on a grant proposal which includes
> a small server room (1-2 racks, networking, cooling, UPS).  I only
> know enough to have an idea of what goes into such a room, and I
> what I need is a set of costs.
> 
> Can anyone on the list give me ballpark figures (and contact emails
> if we get the grant and hire you to implement) for the following:
> 
> 2-3 high powered web servers Backup computer(s) and storage (actual
> data requirements are modest - under 5 Tb) Networking, firewalls,
> etc Cabling, racks Cooling UPS
> 
> All of these rounded to the nearest 4 figures.
> 
> Thanks!

Certainly don't need 2 racks for this.

The term "high powered" is quite vague... What kind of workloads?
Database? If so, what kind? What kind of high availability do you need?

Most of my builds these days use virtual machines on a redundant
cluster. This is pretty straight forward to build, and I've got a
tutorial up you can follow, if you're interested in.

For the storage, you'll need to scope out what speeds are tolerable.
Also be careful to note that platter drives, which you'll really need
for ~5tb, are seriously constrained.

If you decide to cluster the VMs for HA, you'll want to look at either
having separate DRBD resources or strategically using smaller SSDs for
disk-intensive applications (like a DB server's DB data directory).

You'll have a hard time sticking under $10k if you want real HA, but
if you can live with longer down-times, you could look at cheaper
servers. Generally, I use 6x NICs, out-of-band/IPMI enabled mainboards
and redundant power supplies. CPU/cores, RAM and whatnot depends on
the resource needs.

Having a couple decent switches and separate PDUs, plus a couple power
supplies sufficient to hold up one server and switch for the required
amount of time tops it off.

Hard to go into much more detail without knowing more about the build.

- -- 
Digimer
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