MEF Proposals/F2007

Fall 2007

Disks for natural-flavours

The CSClub is running a mirror for Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux distributions. We would also like to archive the raw AVI's of our talks (~ 20 GB each). We are looking at purchasing one to three 750 GB disks, at $240 each. Ideally, we would run two pairs of disks in RAID 0.

Disks for taurine

The CSClub received funding for taurine from MEF, with one of its purposes being to run virtual machines. We currently have two 72 GB disks in RAID 0 (striped) mode, which means the disks are joined to form one logical 144 GB disk providing no redundancy. We would like to request two 146 GB disks (model number 431958-B21). We would then run the two sets of disks in RAID 1, which provides redundancy in the event one disk fails. The HP public sector pricing for a single disk is $512. However, local vendor pricing is typically a few percentage points lower. The cheapest online retailer is $468 per disk. In total, both disks would be at most $936. The disks are more expensive than commodity desktop disks, as they are low-profile (2.5 inch) and SAS (Serial-Attached-SCSI); these are the only type of disks that will work in this machine.

Dedicated disk server

The CSClub maintains our user data (/users) on our primary server, caffeine. When this system goes down, all of our other machines are rendered effectively unusable. Since this is our primary server, it also runs Kerberos, LDAP, Apache, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. This system is also the system most of users use. As such, caffeine is frequently upgraded, which increases the chances of it malfunctioning and going down. Caffeine has been down a number of times in the past.

We have looked into different fallover systems, but we have not found a successful solution. We would like to create a dedicated disk server that would be used exclusively for holding /users and would not be used as a general-use machine. We are asking for the following hardware:

• Motherboard: "Asus M2A-VM Socket AM2 AMD690G + ATI SB600 Chipset Dual Channel DDR2 800/667/533 Integrated ATI X1250 Graphics Micro ATX" - $79
• Processor: "AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (65W) Dual-Core Socket AM2, 2.2GHz, 512KB x2 L2 Cache, 2000MHz HT, 90nm (ADO4200CUBOX)" - $98
• RAM: "Mushkin SP2-6400 DDR2-800 2x1GB CS 5-5-5-18 1.8V (996529)" - $103
• Case/PSU: "Antec NSK3480 mATX Tower Case w/380Watt PSU, Black/Silver" - $89

We would move the 2 SATA disks from caffeine (400 GB each) and a 40 GB IDE disk from caramel-colour into the new disk server. The total amount we are requesting is $369.