[Gllug] best way to update a single production server?

[j.roberts]

John Winters wrote:
> Khusro Jaleel wrote:
>> I apologise...

> I don't think you upset anyone at all - it's just important to get a
> clear idea of what is and what isn't possible.

>> I have not been told that this website must be up 24/7,
>> but it would not be nice if it did go down.

...

> I think the advice you were being given was more to try to stop you
> driving yourself nuts trying to fulfill an impossible requirement.

Just as an aside for those who do not have it as their role to keep up 
with hardware availability, despite the 'crisis' and the consequent jump 
in UK price of Chinese-made hardware (much of everything!), it is still 
possible to purchase - fairly cheaply - real server hardware (albeit 
low-end) that will will support server-level loads as a fall-back.

One example is the HP ML115 series, built with AMD Opterons and a 
low-end server-class chipset and board. We bought loads of these for the 
spares cupboard for just over £100 each, they are still around for about 
£140:

http://store.cbccomputers.com/products.asp?partno=445847-035

(ignore the wrong illustration).

The current model is more expensive but still fairly priced: there is a 
110 series with Xeons which offer more processing cycles if that is the 
requirement but these 115's perform well with high I/O loads (for their 
size).

Of course there are other options: Dell often have offers, we use the 
low-end Xeon ones as spare boxes; no doubt there are many others.

The point being that having a fail-over box to keep a web site up 
*almost* all of the time is doable and not that expensive for low to 
moderate loads (say at least 70K page views a day with static content: 
this an opinion rather than based on testing, but see 
http://biztechmagazine.com/article.asp?item_id=267).

These little boxes significantly outperform some quite high-end hardware 
of 3/4 years ago.

-- 

James Roberts
Stabilys.com
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