How many servers do I need

From: David H (dhigginbotham_at_hazenandsawyer.com)
Date: 02/20/04 

Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 13:53:40 -0500

There is a discussion going on among some IT folks I know concerning how
many servers are best for a certain scenario and I wanted to get the
collective wisdom of this group. This is the scenario: XYZ Engineering
company has a large regional HQ office that is home to approximately 125
engineers. The engineers are using softwares that generate large data files,
this software includes CADD software, Modeling software, and Structural
Analysis software as well as a standard support staff using the MS Office
suite. 4 regional branch offices also have connectivity to these servers for
data sharing among the offices. The office currently has 3 data servers with
each server serving a particular logical area, for example one server houses
CADD files, one houses modeling data, one houses office data, etc.
One side of this debate believes that it would be best to consolidate all
the data on one server. This reduces hardware costs and provides one backup
point and less confusion among data points. The other side of this debate
believes that by distributing the data among several servers that there is a
natural load balancing of data IO at the disk array and the network
interface and that several points of failure exist rather than one. In other
words, if all the data were on one server and this server failed everyone in
the office is out of work until it is fixed, if there are three servers and
one fails, only one third of the staff is out of work. All advice, comments,
and snide remarks are welcome:
Thanks,
David

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