New System Hardware

During the HCoop IRC meeting on June 24, 2006, the group decided that it would based it's new system architecture on the following pieces of hardware:

• Two robust servers, one that doesn't allow normal user logins, and one that does.
• One switch to form a LAN between these servers.
• One serial port device, to facilitate remote access to our servers.

Also, it was mentioned that we should research hardware support contracts from any vendor that will be selling us equipment.

Additionally, group decided that the server that HCoop currently owns, Abulafia, will be brought to he.net for shell service. This will follow a necessary re-load of the OS software at a time to be determined later.

This page will serve as a forum for collaborative research on the pieces of hardware that we need.

Servers

We will be purchasing two servers, which will be configured and sent to he.net for colocation.

Desired Features

These servers should be as redundant as possible. At this point, we cannot afford to have less than one point of failure in many areas, so we should look for the following features in our new servers:

• Redundant power supplies.
• Hardware RAID.
• Dual CPU's, AMD seems to be a stronger option than Intel

Differences Between the Servers

The admin-only server will hopefully be serving an AFS file system, which means that fancier kinds of RAID are justified there. The all-members server can get away with cheaper (and maybe even faster) solutions for local disk access.

There may be other factors influencing different configuration choices between the servers.

Proposed Models and Vendors

Vendors:

• [http://www.penguincomputing.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=172&Itemid=230 Penguin Computing]

• [http://www.dell.com/ Dell]

• [http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=M&Category_Code=allracks Monarch Computer Systems]

Ethernet Switch

Desired Features

• Gigabit
• 5 ports minimum

Proposed Models and Vendors

[http://newegg.com/ Newegg] has been recommended to several of us.

• ($56.99) Highly-rated Netgear switch that is not rack-mountable http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833122111 link

• ($249.99) Level One 16-port rack-mountable switch http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833118021 link

MichaelOlson thinks that we should go with the Netgear switch. It has been rated as a very reliable product, and is very affordable.

Serial Port

Docelic, or other users -- please update this section since I am entirely ignorant about these devices!

Desired Features

Proposed Models and Vendors

[http://www.cyclades.com/ Cyclades] was mentioned as one vendor of serial port devices which are linux-friendly.