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Revision 10 as of 2013-07-14 22:33:03

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NewServerDiscussion2014

1. New Virtualization Host

Now that we are using KernelVirtualMachine, getting systems into use without weeks or months of delay is finally feasible. We're making good strides toward getting rid of mire, and now the time has come to allow deleuze to retire as well. Unfortunately, fritz is effectively at capacity with the web server and member shell vms, so we need a new machine.

The immediate uses for the new machine:

Over the next few months other uses appear:

This means we need hardware featuring something like:

1.1. Possible Hardware

Find a price quote, and list any machines you think would suit the task.

1.1.1. Power Edge R515

Quotes:

1.1.1.1. Other Considerations

2. Backup Drives

As feared, it turns out that we cannot do an afs volume dump to the afs volume partition of the fileserver without grinding hcoop to a halt. ClintonEbadi's early test resulted in fritz thrashing itself into oblivion, and the entire site losing access to the fileserver (never fear! services recovered flawlessly on their own mere minutes after killing the dump). Neither deleuze nor mire nor hopper have the free space required for backing up all of the data we have in afs now, never mind future data.

Thus: we need a pair of drives for a third RAID1 on fritz or the new machine, dedicated to backups. We have nearly 200G in data that needs backing up now, so 500G is the absolute minimum. However, much larger drives are not much more expensive and it's not unrealistic that we would have well over 500G of data in need of backing up 18 months from now (inserting new stuff at the data center is a pain).

2.1. Drive Options

We have caddies for all six bays in FritzInfo plus an extra so we can get anything.

3. OpenAFS Drives

We're only using a bit under 200G of data now, and have a 1TB partition on fritz for afs. So we probably only need another RAID1 of 1TB disks, although we should investigate larger drives to make sure we hit the optimal price/GB vs predicated needs.