Duncan Guy wrote: > Hi all, > > Is it feasible to run virtual servers with EMRs as yet?
If you mean "Run EMRs on virtual servers", then yes, definitely. > Does something like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (gotta love the focus > group who thought that name up) offer an option Amazon EC2 is only really good for short-term capacity needs (eg if you need a few hundred CPUs for a particularly intensive bit of data mining or analysis, or if you need a dozen Web servers to handle the load for some event lasting a week or two). I don't think the economics of EC2 make sense if you need the machines for more than a few weeks at a time. > We have over 40 Drs, 7 sites all relying on an inhouse EMR. > > Our IT guru threw another server at the situation and using Microsoft > load balancing slowed it all down even further, Time for a new IT guru? > In total we have 7 servers doing different jobs, would be good to get > them all working on the same team or outsource it totally, Running as virtual servers on fewer machines is unlikely to improve performance - the main advantages are reduced hardware, hotel (power, aircon, rack space), system admin and back-up costs. The downside is reduced hardware redundancy - if the host machine fails, all your virtual servers have failed too, so a hot or warm spare server is pretty much essential. However, dual-quad-core servers (so that is eight 3GHz CPUs in one server) are now only about $15-18k with 8GB or RAM and some RAIDed discs, so it may be possible to consolidate a lot of those servers onto one machine. It may be that inter-server network bandwidth/latency is the problem, in which case consolidating on a multi-CPU machine may help. You need someone who knows what they are doing to diagnose your performance bottlenecks (by instrumenting your network and servers, capturing data, and then analysing it - not just giving the usual seat-of-the-pants "add another server" opinion). If you have 7 sites, then having your servers hosted in a big data centre may not be a bad idea, though. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
