From: Ben Wheeler <b.wheeler AT ulcc.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:39:54 +0100
| Threading: | ↑ [EP-tech] Hardware platform from mariano.belladonna AT cab.cnea.gov.ar • This Message |
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/eprints-tech *** EPrints community wiki - http://wiki.eprints.org/ On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:46:00AM +0200, Mariano A. Belladonna wrote: > To sum up: What HW platform are you running your repository software on? We use IBM X-series servers running Red Hat Linux. Linux is the best OS for running EPrints. Red Hat wouldn't be my choice of distro (I'm a Debian fan) but it's ok. We've been using IBM x-servers for some years and found them very reliable; disks fail from time to time (as with any machine), that's about it. > Based on your experience, what HW would you recommend to set up a > dedicated server for an IR? Two PC servers: one development, one production. The dev machine can be lower spec than the production but the OS and all the software should be the same. Some sort of hardware RAID, either using disks within the servers, or in an external thing (we use internal disks in RAID-5). Basically you want the machine to stay up if a disk fails, and to be able to hot-replace it, and you'll also benefit from faster disk accesses. Spec your diskspace for at least twice as much space as you think you'll actually need, or make sure you have slots spare to add more later. Use LVM so you can add new disks to existing partitions. If you have a lot of journals/subjects/types/people and generate views for them all, the views can easily take up far more diskspace than the documents themselves. As much other redundancy within the machine as you can afford, eg dual power supplies. Or two simpler PCs on a failover switch for the production service. (Not sure if EPrints is compatible with load-balancing across multiple servers) 4G memory at least, possibly much more depending on your expected load. Some sort of backup solution where you keep multiple backups, possibly for a very long time (months) as sometimes if something goes missing no-one notices for a very long time. Regular offsite backups. Ben