RE: Server

["Andy Laurence" <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Hunter <mailto:cjhunter@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I guess it would be easy to add others, too .. web-server,
> for example ... then again, I wonder it the nature of servers is
> changing ... ie: tasks are being shared on a network, duplication is
> being reduced, with each machine doing its bit, according to its
> speciality ... etc etc.

I'd say it's going more the othre way.  Virtualisation is starting to
take off, even at enterprise level.  Running multiple machines on one
piece of hardware is now commonplace.  In fact, this laptop I'm typing
on is also running two other virtual machines using VMWare GSX.

> So, how about RAID ... will we all need / have RAID (0, 1, 10,
> whatever)  before long ?

It depends how much resilience you require.  Personally, I'm trying to
keep power consumption down, so one disk is better than two.  Also, the
kind of machine that has a RAID controller, tends to have two
processors, and consumes vastly more power.  I think of it this way - my
data is backed up off-site, and I can restore a machine in a short space
of time, should I need to using either images or backups.

Cheers,
Andy