MEF Proposals/F2007
Fall 2007
Disks for natural-flavours
The CSClub is looking at running a mirror for various Linux distributions and related software archives. We would also like to archive the raw AVI's of our talks (~ 20 GB each). We are looking at purchasing one to four 750 GB disks, at $240 each.
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: M2A-VM - $72
- Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ EE - $78
- RAM: TWIN2X2048-6400 2x1GB - $100
- Case/PSU: Antec NSK3480 - $90
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 $340.