its always strange to see that people want "cheap servers". Let me tell you it will NEVER pay off.
50 people will kill a low end thing, especially if you want to do software based RAID, the throughput that is required by that data coming in and out will make you users VERY unhappy and then say CentOS is crap.
You need at least some XEON based motherboard, proper ECC RAM and HARDWARE RAID, anything else will not work.
That said you can buy decent motherboards from the lower end of INTEL server boards, put a decent CPU into it and get one of the 4 channel Adaptec cards, splitting data and OS onto separate raid channels, they got 2 GB network cards so you can split the throughput in half.
I know this works because the small school that I look after has that setup.
jobst
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 05:53:55PM +0200, Niki Kovacs (contact@kikinovak.net) wrote:
Hi,
The language lab from the local university has contacted me. They'd like to have a low-cost file server for storing all their language video files. They have a mix of Windows, Mac OS X and even Linux clients, roughly 50 machines. The files are quite big, and they calculated a total amount of 2 To of storage.
I'm not very proficient with hardware, meaning either I'm dealing with remote servers in some datacenter, or otherwise I install CentOS desktops on any hardware people throw at me.
Since the aim is lowcost, would it be wrong to install that fileserver on a no-name desktop PC with a 64bit processor and enough RAM, and then simply put 2 x 2 To hard disks in it, either with a mirroring RAID (can never remember which does what in 0, 1 and 5) or some rsync script regularly copying over the first disk to the second? Or do you have something more apt to suggest?
Cheers from South France,
Niki _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos