3.2. Hardware selection, performance and reliability factors

There are 2 types of hardware in a machine that are likely to fail easily, the disk drives and the power supply. We suggest hot-plug SCSI RAID disk drives, redundant power supply with UPS. This is a standard hardware configuration of a modern file server. For performance considerations, dual Pentium processors, 2 x 100Mbps network card, using 100Mbps switches, this will adequate to serve 50+ diskless clients, actual performance depends on the application you are going to run on the client.

For heavy duty, you might consider gigabit back plane solutions. The administrator have to make sure the disk space usage or setup disk quotas for your users. You may also read the Aptus whitepapers on-line to gather more information about network bandwidth calculations.

Running diskless clients can also add load to the server, if your client machines have very little memory, we suggest you to use local disk drives at the client for swaps with trade-off a little administration work and little risk of failure in the clietn machine. If going for diskless clients is a must, it is suggested diskless clients should have 256MB memory or more in running large applications like OpenOffice and KDE. You may also setup a separate swap server to eat the swap I/O from Aptus clients which will reduce the disk I/O load for your Aptus server.