David,

Thanks for the very helpful reply.  I think I'm on the right track in scoping 
our new servers.  You advocate using 3 servers, and in this architecture, how 
would one prepare for a failure scenario in any one these servers?

I'm curious to know how your customers are using the IMDC functionality in 
their businesses --specifically, what front-ends they are using or have 
developed for referencing and reporting on their data?

We would really love to have the depth of the IMDC backend with the ease and 
flexibility of the IM strip charts.  It's too bad the data for IMDC and strip 
charts are stored separately.  I would love to retire our Cacti platform, which 
we use for storing and charting historical data, in lieu of a single platform 
for polling, monitoring and charting (InterMapper).

Thanks again.

On May 3, 2012, at 9:48 AM, "dschnur" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> With the database enabled, the key factor becomes the number of datasets that 
> you're exporting.  By default that's response time and short-term packet loss 
> for all devices, plus sent/received bytes/sec for all interfaces.  So if each 
> of your devices had 16 interfaces, that would be 2000 * 2 + 2000 * 16 * 2, 
> for a total of 68000 datasets.
> 
> For architectural reasons, performance degrades heavily with more than 20-40k 
> datasets.  We're working to increase this limit, but for now the best 
> performance investment is reducing that number.  A couple of hours spent 
> narrowing the datasets to just those that you *really* want to report on has 
> a greater impact than a million dollars of hardware.
> 
> Generally, though, the software is I/O-bound, particularly when using the 
> database.  And with a single machine, the bottleneck becomes contention 
> rather than bandwidth.  If physical space isn't a concern, it's therefore 
> much more effective to get three lower-powered systems, running IM, IMDC and 
> Flows separately, than a single high-powered one.  SAS doesn't help nearly as 
> much as avoiding having three processes constantly fighting over the position 
> of the disk head.
> 
> My ideal setup on a budget would be three machines with the cheapest 
> consumer-grade Core i7s and 4/8/8 GB of RAM for the IM, IMDC and Flows 
> machines, respectively.  If I was still under-budget, I'd get an SSD for the 
> IM machine and SATA RAID0 for the IMDC & Flows machines, with some money set 
> aside to cover the fact that SSDs and consumer SATA drives tend to fail a lot 
> faster than server-grade SAS.
> 
> But I'd sacrifice just about anything if the money could instead be spent on 
> having someone figure out exactly which datasets to export.
> 
> David
> 
> -----------
> David Schnur
> Dartware, LLC
> 
> 
> -------------------- m2f --------------------
> 
> Read this topic online here:
> http://forums.intermapper.com/viewtopic.php?p=4077#4077
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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