Hey julia,
Have you considered whether surplused hardware from within your organization
could be used for some of this?
It may not suffice for a windows server, and i did not see if you already have
linux boxes.
Linux is a great platform for GIS for both desktops and servers. This might be
a too big of a jump right now but in the future might be a viable option.
Cheers
Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network
-----Original Message-----
From: Julia Harrell <juliaharr...@mindspring.com>
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 11:06:48
To: <discuss@lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Comparision between MapServer/OpenLayers and
ESRI ArcIMS
Hi Bill
In addition to the excellent advice others have already given you, be sure to
consider the extra hardware infrastructure that will be necessary to support
this much 3D data, on-the-fly geoprocessing, and large numbers of concurrent
users. If your client chooses an ESRI solution, it will take a lot more than
they probably counted on purchasing to get a system that will perform
adequately. ArcGIS Server is a real resource hog. Check out Dave Peter's new
"Building a GIS" book. Not that I am a fan of the AGS software at all, but Dave
is a really smart guy and he's put a huge amount of work into designing and
fine tuning his "Capacity Planning Tool", which is now available. One used to
have to go take the ESRI System Design Class in order to get a copy of the
tool. I took it a couple years ago from Dave, and can attest to his
thoroughness in building the CPT. You can download updated versions of the CPT
from the website now.
http://gis.esri.com/esripress/display/index.cfm?fuseaction=display&websiteID=141&moduleID=42
The CPT is pretty complex and does take some training to use properly, so
unless you're going to take the system design class, you probably ought to get
the book. It would be great if, one day, a similar tool was available for
Mapserver/Geoserver/PostGIS systems (hint, hint listserv experts).
Unfortunately, I'm just not knowledgeable enough about the inner guts of the
OpenGIS softwares yet to be able to convert all the formulas in Dave's
spreadsheet to something more appropriate for an OpenGIS system.
I was a little surprised to see just how *much* server hardware and network
bandwidth it would *really* take to implement a usable ESRI server-based GIS
system for my organization, which has offices all over the state and crappy
bandwidth in a lot of the more remote places, not to mention the uncountable
anonymous public users. Right now we've got AGS running on a single server, and
it is dog slow and needs a lot of babying. When I told my "IT overlords" that
I'd need at least 2 more load balanced GIS processing servers and a separate
production GIS database server to speed things up to an acceptable level, well,
they just laughed at me. Mapserver, PostGIS and Geoserver all run "OK, but not
blazingly fast" on a single, older shared GIS server for me. AGS gets the
other, newer GIS server all to itself - and is still a complete pig. Sure, the
OpenGIS software would be a lot faster if they each had their own dedicated
box, but in this budget climate, extra funding for more hardware is just not
possible...
Hope this helps,
Julia Harrell
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