Hong?!?

[Janx]

Wow! This community rocks on toast....

I'm now imagining bright shiny servers powered by dilithium crystals or something!

Seriously, we're looking at the technical configuration of a bank of servers. One of them connected to the outside world, the other two devoted to specific tasks (I'm not a technical expert myself - leaving that to others - but phrases like "a PHP procesing machine and a database machine" are being thrown around right now).

I second ThirdWizard's recommendation on the DL385. Good machine. The DL380's also good (AMD for the former, intel for the latter). Make sure you get the latest generation.

Also, I recommend SAS drives over SATA. SATA drives have a higher failure rate (cheaper cost...). There's not many drive bays on the DL38x, but disks are big anyway... Setup as a RAID5 or better (RAID 0 gives no protection from drive failure).

You may want to rethink your server arrangement. I find that seperating functions across servers (DB server, web Server) is nice and clean, but the network acts as a bottleneck between the web sever and the DB server. Putting both DB and PHP/APache on the same server usually gives top performance for single page requests. Splitting work across servers is best done for load balancing and redundancy reasons.

I assume y'all are running linux, apache, PHP5, and MySQL or PostGRES. We've found that makes a pretty fast application server where I live.


Good luck.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

Wow, people are coming out of the wood works to donate huge amounts. I appreciate Enworld, thus I donated a little as well. I wish I could say I was inspired by the 5 mentioned above, but I donated before the first large chunk happened.

It was simple for me, I get at least $5 worth of enjoyment out of the enworld message boards. Thus I donated. I'll skip lunch one day and call it my Enworld Server Hunger Break

 

[carborundum]

Wowzers! You guys rock!
I bought some pdfs but I'm inspired to donate as well now - as soon as my paycheck lands though

 

[Brown Jenkin]

Hey, you should/i] pat yourself on the back, even for a small donation. What that $20 means to you is not lessened by what these others did.

We may have a few big spenders, but the small ones are still making a big difference in what Morrus will be able to afford.

listen to Umbran. I can't afford to give everything that is needed. If it weren't all the other donors Morrus would still be far behind. If you give what you are able, you deserve a pat on the back.

 

[garyh]

I've been back here at EN World a lot since 4E came out, and I've taken this opportunity to start up again as a Community Supporter, which I used to be long ago. It's not a giant game show-style check, but it helps (and I get the search feature again!).

Thanks to all the big donors, and just as much, thanks to all the folks giving what they can, or upgrading Community Supporter accounts.

 

[xmanii]

Very cool of them, and a big thanks to everyone that has donated!

 

[Filcher]

I don't know a thing about servers, but for 5k this puppy better fly....

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I don't know a thing about servers, but for 5k this puppy better fly....

3-5k basically gets you a average level starter server without software. For the loads this one is forced to deal with my expectation is more in the 8-10k range to get something speedy (That includes free software and volunteer install time).

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

I, uh... think I should probably go back to the store and try to make my transaction work a second time. I suddenly feel a bit silly about being such a cheapskate.

Wow. This is insane and awesome.

 

[Morrus]

We can add another superhero to the list: Helfdan has also donated $1000!

I need to think of some cool way to thank these folks.