After about three years using the current hardware for Scene.org we were starting to run out of diskspace. This is a returning headache ffor online archives like us, but this time it looks like we have a sollution that will last us more than the usual short period. Our main sponsor Hogeschool Rotterdam has offered us the use of an external SCSI raid enclosure containing 16 harddisks of 300GB each. The entire raid system provides us with 4 Terabytes of RAID5 storage!

With our previous storage being only 550GB, the new raid array will probably last us for quite a while before it's full. Another big bounus is that we now use a dual channel LSI Logic U320 SCSI controller, instead of the old 3ware SATA raid controller. The old controller did not have any onboard cache memory and was recently becoming a very noticable bottleneck in the system. Now with this upgrade, the new controller has 256MB cache onboard and if that's not enough the raid enclosure also has 512MB cache. This all should also give a nice noticable performance boost to the services we provide.

The raid array has been divided in half. Where one half holds the ftp filesystem and the other half contains the web filesystems and homedirectories, so we can lateron add a second server to our setup as a dedicated webserver.

The next big upgrade will probably replace the current server hardware. The server is now over three years old and could do with a nice CPU and mainboard upgrade.

Again we would like to thank the Hogeschool Rotterdam for their great support!

posted by Redhound