We're shopping for a new server setup here at my office. We've looked at Dell and IBM and Apple, all approved BYU suppliers, but I was impressed with Vision Computers' offerings. Well, some people are not liking the idea of going with a lesser-known company, citing support and reliability issues. Our response has been that if we're going to spend $X on two Dells, and get next-day support, we'd rather spend $X on 2 *pair* of Vision servers (1 pair Win2K, 1 pair Debian) and run them as mirrors of each other with load balancing. That would give us increased performance *and* redundancy for much less downtime than a next-day service contract.
These servers would have the following specs: 2.4 P4, 512MB L2, 533MHz FSB 768MB PC2100 DDR RAM 2 80GB HDD RAID Striped
So, my questions for you are as follows:
1. The RAID controllers are Promise FastTrak Lite. Any caution from the Linux community on these?
2. How does mirroring/load balancing work in Debian? Anyone used GNU Queue? or mod_backhand?
3. Would it be worth having an additional gigabyte ethernet to connect the mirrors together?
4. Any cautions, advice, etc. I should have before proceeding?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards,
Jeremy
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