Our enterprise group has informed us that it’s time for new servers for Orion & for the database. They are asking for our recommendations.
We use NPM, Netflow, NCM & are looking at purchasing the Engineers Toolset in the near future.
We will use one server for the Orion suite of apps and one server for the database.
We have 2141 elements, which will gradually increase. We pull netflow data from 185 devices, with around 900 interfaces that we monitor netflow traffic on, so we have quite a bit of netflow data. We keep uncompressed Netflow data for 60 minutes & compressed data for 60 days.
For the database server we will request the team set the server up as follows:
C: - 15 k drives, RAID1 for OS (our dba recommended RAID1 instead of RAID0, in case we have a failure, so we don’t go offline)
E: - 15 k drives, RAID1 SQL Server & SQL temp database & logs
F: - 15 k drives, RAID10 for the NPM/NTA database
How should we divide the space among the spindles? I’m thinking at least 150 GB for the database partition. We’re going to ask for minimum of 1TB of space for the DB server. Database is currently 6100MB.
Does it matter for the application server, regarding the spindles?
They are purchasing HP Prolients with AMD Opteron 6174, which has 12 core 2.2 GHz CPU’s, which is lower than the recommended 3.0 GHz, but since it has 12 cores, they think we should be okay. Is that a fair assessment?
Also, I noticed that the minimum RAM is 3 GB, but it’s recommended to get as much RAM as you can get for the database server. If it’s running in 32-bit mode, can it benefit from more than 4GB?
They’ve asked why we can’t put the database on the same box as the server, but we’re going to request that they keep them as separate servers for performance reasons. We used to have them on the same server and took a big performance hit.
They will run Windows Server 2008 R2 and the database server will have SQL Server 2008 standard.
