Hi,
My wise friend encouraged me to ask for advise - better to get the opinion of the collective minds of geniuses than to blindly accept that of one.
I work for a very small actuarial firm. Before I began working there, they used a silo system - everyone working and storing their work on their individual computers. Our server was used to host our website and a store a few files and allow access to one another's computers. With my encouragement, we now store our work on the server so that it's centrally located for better accessibility. But the actually computing is still done on our systems - primarily quad-core computers with a decent amount of processor power and ram.
I'd like to see us move to a server version of our software so that the actual computing would be done on the server.
To upgrade, our techie has given us an estimate for a second server and a tower so that we can have a cluster environment. The main things we hope to gain with the upgrade is a system wherein if a server or hard drive goes down, we can maintain productivity until he can come in and service down part.
My question stems from the fact that I believe we are moving from a KIA to a Ferrari when a Lexus might suffice.
His bid for the server is the following:
HP Proliant ML350p G8 SQL Server
Twelve Core Processor
64 GB (8x4GB) 2Rx4 PC3 12800R-11 Memory, expandable to 192GB
HP 512 MB FBWC for P-Series Smart Array
8-bay hot plug Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive cage
Six (6) 300GB SAS 6G 10K rpm 2.5” Hot-Plug Hard Drives (1.2TB) – RAID5
The cost of this system is between 8 & 9K
Along with this he suggest a Drobo that is MS cluster enabled. Unfortunately, the only Drobo that fits that bill is a Drobo B1200i 12TB SAN Array. I can't imagine that we will ever be large enough to warrant a 12 bay storage system. Also, we do number crunching. My understanding is that a SAN array is intended for large companies where a lot of large files are being stored rapidly (such as call centers and hospitals). My limited research would indicate that we would do fine with a much smaller, less expensive NAS array as long as it is Windows Server 2012 or 2012RT compatible. The Drobo he suggested is approx $6K.
The software vendors recommendation for a server is basically that we have 1 or 2 GB per core and that the processor be either a
Xeon E5-2697 v2 2.70 GHz 12 cores or
Xeon E5-2695 v2 2.40 GHz 12 cores.
I would appreciate any suggestions anyone might have for building a system that will do a lot of number crunching (it can take a single user up to 10 hours to do a single run on a quad-core desktop) and offer us the protection of a cluster system without costing a full years salary of one of our students!! The full system suggested would cost approx 30K.
Thank you in advance,
Nancy
My wise friend encouraged me to ask for advise - better to get the opinion of the collective minds of geniuses than to blindly accept that of one.
I work for a very small actuarial firm. Before I began working there, they used a silo system - everyone working and storing their work on their individual computers. Our server was used to host our website and a store a few files and allow access to one another's computers. With my encouragement, we now store our work on the server so that it's centrally located for better accessibility. But the actually computing is still done on our systems - primarily quad-core computers with a decent amount of processor power and ram.
I'd like to see us move to a server version of our software so that the actual computing would be done on the server.
To upgrade, our techie has given us an estimate for a second server and a tower so that we can have a cluster environment. The main things we hope to gain with the upgrade is a system wherein if a server or hard drive goes down, we can maintain productivity until he can come in and service down part.
My question stems from the fact that I believe we are moving from a KIA to a Ferrari when a Lexus might suffice.
His bid for the server is the following:
HP Proliant ML350p G8 SQL Server
Twelve Core Processor
64 GB (8x4GB) 2Rx4 PC3 12800R-11 Memory, expandable to 192GB
HP 512 MB FBWC for P-Series Smart Array
8-bay hot plug Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive cage
Six (6) 300GB SAS 6G 10K rpm 2.5” Hot-Plug Hard Drives (1.2TB) – RAID5
The cost of this system is between 8 & 9K
Along with this he suggest a Drobo that is MS cluster enabled. Unfortunately, the only Drobo that fits that bill is a Drobo B1200i 12TB SAN Array. I can't imagine that we will ever be large enough to warrant a 12 bay storage system. Also, we do number crunching. My understanding is that a SAN array is intended for large companies where a lot of large files are being stored rapidly (such as call centers and hospitals). My limited research would indicate that we would do fine with a much smaller, less expensive NAS array as long as it is Windows Server 2012 or 2012RT compatible. The Drobo he suggested is approx $6K.
The software vendors recommendation for a server is basically that we have 1 or 2 GB per core and that the processor be either a
Xeon E5-2697 v2 2.70 GHz 12 cores or
Xeon E5-2695 v2 2.40 GHz 12 cores.
I would appreciate any suggestions anyone might have for building a system that will do a lot of number crunching (it can take a single user up to 10 hours to do a single run on a quad-core desktop) and offer us the protection of a cluster system without costing a full years salary of one of our students!! The full system suggested would cost approx 30K.
Thank you in advance,
Nancy
