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Date:      Wed, 5 Jan 2000 19:24:31 -0500
From:      "Robert J. Adams" <radams@siscom.net>
To:        "Gary D. Margiotta" <gary@tbe.net>, "Troy Settle" <troy@picus.com>
Cc:        "FreeBSD ISP" <freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: News Server reccomendations (one more thing)
Message-ID:  <02b301bf57dc$d0ffa620$3102fbd1@siscom.net>
References:  <Pine.LNX.4.10.10001051448500.3562-100000@thud.tbe.net>

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Gary,

Not sure if I agree with you. With the size of news today (we bring in about
81-90G/day) it would take a LOT of 9gig drives to store it for a week. We
have been using 50gig barracudas (about 24 per server, soon to be 32) in a
RAID 0+1 setup. Yea, we loose half the space w/ this setup due to the raid,
but it's lightening fast and fully redundant. I'm just waiting for IBM to
start shipping the damn 72G drives.. then again.. we kinda go crazy with
news.

-j

---
Robert J. Adams radams@siscom.net http://www.siscom.net
Looking to outsource news? http://www.newshosting.com
SISCOM Network Administration - President, SISCOM Inc.
Phone: 937-222-8150 FAX: 937-222-8153

----- Original Message -----
From: Gary D. Margiotta <gary@tbe.net>
To: Troy Settle <troy@picus.com>
Cc: FreeBSD ISP <freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG>
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 2:55 PM
Subject: Re: News Server reccomendations (one more thing)


> In our experiences with news, you really don't want to RAID the spool
> array... it's the same idea as in a heavily loaded mail server... the
> smaller the disk, the more disks you have, the more spindles, the better
> off you are.  I would personally love to have 100 2GB Barracudas in a
> rack, but that leads to one heckuva lot of real estate.
>
> IMHO, keep your spools away from RAID... with the introduction of U2W and
> 10,000 RPM drives, you can put 2 silos filled with 9 GB U2W drives, and
> still have it be insanely fast and large.  You don't want to go above 9GB
> in one shot, otherwise when a drive goes, you'll lose a heckuva lot of
> information.  Also beware of striping, as if one disk goes, you lose one
> large chunk of spool.  And drives will go... just due to the stress of
> being up and running 24/7/365, usually at heavy useage.
>
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Gary D. Margiotta wrote:
>
> >
> > We are running Dnews on 2 FreeBSD 3.3-STABLE boxes.  The primary machine
> > is a Dual P-II 450, 512MB RAM, with a DPT 3334-UW and 2 Adaptec 2940UW's
> > (Not U2W yet). It rocks. I have to honestly say, that the box is much
> > faster and more stable than the Solaris/Breeze (Breeze is from the same
> > people who make Typhoon) config we had previously on the same box.
> >
> > The other box is a P-II 300 w 256MB RAM, a DPT 3334-UW, and an Adaptec
> > 2940UW with 4 Medalist drives mirrored as OS/history, and 8 Quantum
> > Fireball UW drives for spool.  This machine is our text server, no
> > binaries, and has 24 GB for spool.
> >
> > On the binary server, we have 4 mirrored system drives for OS and
history,
> > and we have 2 Data silos with 9 Seagate Medalist drives in each.  Each
> > silo is run off a separate Adaptec 2940, totalling 72GB of spool
> > currently.  I'm trying to migrate all of the Seagate drives off to 9GB
IBM
> > UW drives, as the DPT card and the Medalists don't really like each
> > other... that's the reason for the extra Adaptecs.
> >
> > Currently, we have about 10k direct news users, and we resell services,
so
> > the machines are quite heavily abused, and they never complain.  Load
> > never ever comes even close to 1.00, machine is always responsive, and I
> > think we could easily handle another 10-15k users without a problem.
> >
> > -Gary
> >
> > On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Troy Settle wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Hey all,
> > >
> > > The company I'm working for is currently using D-News on NT for
usenet.  I'm
> > > a total newbie to the NNTP game, but am under the impression that
Dnews
> > > isn't a very good solution for an ISP with 20k users.
> > >
> > > I think I want to reccomend something like Typhoon, and I need to get
some
> > > hardware reccomendations, like single or dual CPU system?  how much
memory?
> > > what kind of storage subsystem?
> > >
> > > I'm thinking a dual cpu box with as much RAM as it will take, and 100+
gig
> > > of RAID or Appliance would be the way to get this started, but I need
> > > validation on this.
> > >
> > > Another option might be to use MFS, and not have any fixed disks in
the
> > > machine itself, and use a network applicance for the spool.
> > >
> > >
> > > Thoughts and opinions?
> > >
> > > -Troy
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> > > with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> > with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
> >
>
>
>
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