Off Topic - Sort Of:
For all of you real engineers and IT types out there I thought I would post this problem that I am working on. I hope to get some good suggestions and also illustrate what the market for SANs is and what it isn't.
I am currently critiquing a Minnesota state agency's plan to upgrade their computer systems. The projected cost is $290,000 over 4 years. This strikes me as being somewhat high - for the following reasons:
1. The task of the board is to monitor licensing and associated disciplinary action of 20,000 applicants. The task involves a once a year license renewal and following a handful of complaints that are not dismissed each year. Each year the applicant fills out a form, checking off categories in about 30 boxes and supplying additional text only if needed. The agency reviews the application and either issues a license renewal or takes other action. Litigation against or corrective actions against some of the applicants might require additional data entry, but I have no idea what the specifics would be for the total cases requiring corrective action or litigation (<100 persons/year).
2. The agency is requesting $290,000 as "expansion/upgrading" of the current system.
When I saw this I went to the Dell site and look at their servers for businesses with less than 200 employees. Their PowerEdge Server came in at $22,000 with the following features:
Quad Pentium II Xeon 500 MHz/512 KB cache
512 MB RAM
4-36 GB Ultra-2/LVD SCSI 7200 RPM Hard Drives
RAID Controller
Ethernet NIC, Windows NT, and 3 years support
I figured that the 144 GB of internal storage would be enough for 500 pages of text for each of the 20,000 licensees. Since most of the applicants work 35 - 40 years I felt this was adequate. (I did not figure out the specific drive configuration needed for the RAID at this storage level only the total GB of storage).
The practical questions I have for anyone who has actually worked with a system like this:
1. Would the Microsoft database or spreadsheet applications work well with NT and RAID? If not, is there more scalable software - specifically a database application that would and what would it cost?
2. Would this be a reasonable system for the application and if so, what would the additional $265,000 be used for? The Dell server has hard drive options up to 252 GB of internal storage.
3. What would be a reasonable add on, if you wanted to add an additional TB of RAID through the exiting I/O bus? Which addition would be cost effective and within the budget?
4. The agency wants to do statistical analysis of the database. They currently supply only descriptive statistics of complaints and actions and they have no apparent plans for more elaborate studies. It appears to me that sophisticated statistical software is unnecessary.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this, especially the IT folks out there. Feel free to e-mail me or send a private message through SI, especially if you are talking about specific products. I think this exercise also illustrates that you can get a huge amount of internal RAID storage at a very reasonable cost.
George D. |
