I need to write a proposal for, and hopefully implement, a colocation based network within the next few weeks. I know what I want, network and software wise, but I'm a bit up in the air as hardware goes. We'll be running linux and I strongly prefer a 32 bit x86 infrastructure for that, but otherwise I have no strong requirements.
I'm looking for general suggestions along the lines of what are good brands and/or vendors, and if there are obvious things I should look out for. If there are multiple good suggestions, points will be boosted and split.
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Good point!
This will be a public web server system. I am imagining one/two load balancers public-facing (likely behind a hardware firewall), 2 web servers and one database server. I'd like to plan for relatively high traffic without too much initial cost.
On the whole though, I'm looking for general suggestions, perhaps this brand is strong, and this brand's quality is bad, etc.
I personally prefer a Cisco PIX as my firewall. As for the server hardware that will greatly depend on your persoanl preference and budget limitations. I have a local company that build all of mine since they have historically been very reliable and offer a great warranty on thier product. AS far as big name companies go I would put my trust in HP or IBM. HP is great because you can purchase a support plan that will get a tech on-site within 4 hours, i'm not sure if IBM has aything similar.
For your Web Servers i would recommend at least a dual processor machine with at least a gig of RAM. For the database server I would also use a dual processor machine as well and again use at least a gig of RAM. Ideally your database server will have more hard drive space available than your web servers will. I would also use a hardware RAID, I personally prefer to mirror all of my drives, but that is a lot more expensive than say RAID-5.
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by: CallandorPosted on 2005-08-23 at 07:20:45ID: 14733690
You should specify how many users you have, what you will be using the servers for, your requirements for how much downtime is acceptable, and your budget. These will help narrow down the hardware that is suitable for your purposes.