[Bioclusters] requesting help for computational server setup (PE 4600)

[Aaron Darling]

I would suggest taking your disks out of RAID 0.  See:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=SingleDriveVsRaid0

The other FAQs at storage review may be worth your time as well.
To summarize:  RAID 0 has decreased reliability over a single drive.
Despite having increased sequential transfer rates, non-sequential access
patterns (e.g. server/multi-user usage) are better for data distributed
across two independent drives than with RAID 0 in general.  If you insist
on RAID, you should sacrifice capacity and do RAID 1, buying you increased
reliability, better seek times than RAID 0, and equivalent transfer rates
to RAID 0 (assuming you've got a decent controller).

-Aaron


On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, karthik viswanathan wrote:

>
> We have a PowerEdge 4600 server running RedHat 9. The system spec is given below.
>
> Server Specs:
>
> Dell PowerEdge 4600
> Intel Xeon 2800 MHz Processor
> 4096 MB ECC DDR Ram
> 512 Cache
> 2 x 146 GB SCSI hard disks (RAID 0)
> OS : RedHat 9 (kernel 2.4.20-8), file system - ext3
>
> The main usage of this server is for bioinformatics computational work. Clients
> run search/match C or C++ programs on this server through protocols like ssh.
> The no of clients will be not more than 4. This server is also acting as a file
> server for the same clients. T Get 3 newhe performance is not satisfactory so we
> are planning to do some modification in the configuration. One of our plan is
> promote a client workstation(dell precision-340, 1.5 GHz & 1GB ram) to a file
> server and switch the two SCSI hard disk from the PowerEdge server to this
> workstation. Add 3 new SCSI hard disk (37 GB) to the PowerEdge server and set a
> RAID 0, if possible also add a second identical processor to the server.
>
> We are interested to know if this will improve the performance of the
> computational server. Also it would be helpful if you could suggest any other
> alternatives for improving the computational performance for bioinformatics
> work. If any of you have poweredge 4600 please share your experience and ur
> system configuration. Suggestions on disk partitioning, kernel and file system
> to use will also be helpful
>
> Thanks for your time and help
> Karthik
>
>
> PS: We are more interested to improve the computational power than file handling!
>
>
>
>
>
>
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