GCD Hardware Committee

[Will Allred]

First, my apologies for not posting sooner. Work has kept me much busier
than I prefer for the last several weeks.
So, welcome to the gcd-hardware committee.
I see the purpose of this committee as investigating computing resources
required by our project. Pretty simple, right.
Now, to get my biases out in the open.I'm a hardware guy. I've been a
server/network admin for a decade now, and I haven't run across a problem
yet that I can't just throw hardware at to fix it. :-) Seriously though,
what we need to do here is try to figure out the processing, memory, and
storage requirements to keep the project growing. In addition, we should
probably discuss things like RAID (for storage), clustering (servers and
databases), networking, and probably one or two things that I'm forgetting.
So, that's our rough agenda.
I'll try to post some thoughts/ideas over the next several days, but please
don't wait for me.let's get discussion started.

Will
______________________________

Will Allred <wal...@gmail.com>
http://willallred.com/

[Lionel English]

Some of the questions I have are:

 

We have two dedicated servers at the moment.  They meet our present needs, but we want to look to the future.  How much of our current resources are we consuming?  Is there reason to believe we'll outgrow them in... two years?  Four?  Six?

 

Do we have a need for a third server?  A fourth?  What needs would those be, what benefits would they provide?  What costs would that impose?  Would they need to be full featured servers like our current servers, or would smaller machines be adequate?  What about alternatives like the cloud computing solutions someone recently posted somewhere?

 

Also, a few software questions, such as what tools or analytics do we need that will help provide useful information to sysadmins?  And/or to our development team?

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net