Enterprise storage hardware advice needed

disgust

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Feb 7, 2007
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I'm also curious as to some suggestions on forums really geared towards server hardware discussion. if you know any good ones, please let me know

anyway, here's the situation:

I currently lease my servers. I'm planning on switching to colocation. three primary functions need to be met:

1) web server
2) mysql server
3) mass storage

I'm contemplating the best way to do this. price is a concern but I'm willing to pay more if it's warranted.

would it be a bad idea to have the mass storage and the webserver on the same machine? ie, take the web server box and just throw in a SAS/SATA RAID card and put in the extra disks. it'd obviously save in overhead costs.

if I do put them on one box, should the OS be booting from seperate physical disks from the rest of the storage?

if I don't put them on one box, ie, the web server and the storage server are seperated, what would be the ideal way to connect them? just ethernet/LAN, through a fibre connection, etc?

and that brings me to another question... why does SAS have external adapters if it's not supposed to be used to directly attach the array to more than one box? can it be used this way? is there a reason it shouldn't be?

(additional info and questions...)

15K is my absolute cap assuming I went three seperate servers (web, mysql, db). that being said, I definitely prefer starting with something significantly cheaper-- if there's a significant advantage to be had by spending more, I don't have a problem with that at all, but I'd just like to know what it is.

scalability & reliability / redundancy is most important.

everyone seems to suggest seperating the media stuff into its own box. I'm just not getting why that'd be worth it-- more for the chassis, cpu, drives, etc. seems to me that it'd just make the most sense to have the web server in a large box along with the drive array (4U, 16x hotswap?)

I'm likely going to be going with RAID5 + 1 hotswap drive, and SAS but with SATA drives for the data portion.

so the basic questions:

what exactly is the purpose of SAS external adapters? can they be used in a fibre direct-attached-storage way, to show the array as a native disk on other computers? can they attach to another box that just houses more drives to add those drives to the array?

what disadvantages are there to having both the storage array and the web server in the same box, vs having them seperated? the former definitely seems to make the most sense financially.

how are system drives normally handled in situations like this? having, say, 2x drives in RAID 1 for the system but then 8 drives in the SAS/SATA RAID5 array with a hotspare seems like quite a waste. that's three drives being used for redundancy, essentially.

do RAID/SAS cards generally have a limit to the number of devices in an array, if they support expanders? ie will an 8 port SAS RAID card be able to support 32 drives in the array, hypothetically? (using the SAS > 4x SATA cables)
 

PC_Side_Line

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Feb 7, 2007
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