Web clustering and raid fileserver
I will be moving from Dedicated hosting to collocated hosting in the near future. I am currently running 3 Dell PowerEdge 2850 Servers each in a RAID5 array with 5x146 drives.
When I go colo, I am planning on having one main fileserver (I haven't decided whether it will be Dell or a custom build) optimized for disk reads. I am planning a raid5 or raid10 config. I will then have 3-5 webservers (either poweredge 1850s or custom builds) reading from the fileserver via NFS for the website data.
My question is this: In order to maximize disk seek speed and RAID performance (and reliability), what sort of a RAID card should I be looking for? More specifically, what are reliable, high-performance brands and what sort of specs (buffer sizes, etc) should I be looking for?
I am also torn between having Dell build a server or having a custom built server with more drives and better specs for about the same cost. Any suggestions?
What are your general thoughts about the cluster setup (using one main fileserver and multiple webservers reading via NFS)? Do you think this is a good or bad plan? Why?
I will of course have spare drives, a spare Fileserver and spare webservers around in case anything fails.
Thanks for all of your help. Ive spent nearly all of the last three days reading threads on this forum and much of it is very useful for my current project.
Dave
ps> I first posted this in colo and then realized it may be better suited in this forum
