Server advice needed: replacing XServe

Are you stuck on OS-X? You got me thinking about LDAP slaves on (my preference) cheap iron from supermicro, and use a iMac or macmini as administrative console.

But, I'd go for two mini's, a thunderbolt-connected diskarray and a good backup-solution for your files. Remember, current mini's are incredibly fast compared to your old iron, so they should be easily able to handle anything you're doing right now. Yes, having i7's is a step back if compared to current Xeons, but a i7 now comes quite close to a 4 year old Xeon. Memorybandwidth, I/O-bandwith, even simple stuff like disk-throughput has been growing year after year.

 

Mac Mini

Mac mini is the way forward....

Or if you want a mac pro, wait, as some new ones would be about to come out any day now (and rumours has it there will be a rack mountable version)

 

If it is currently plural perhaps you may need to go to three mini setup.

OD master
File server master
OD secondary / File server secondary.

Budget wise that is a bit bigger though.


You need to profile the network I/O load on both Mac and Windows servers to see if merging them would create a hotspot. Preferably doing some high load periods (everyone logining in and grabbing some storage around the same time). Remember only have a single 1GbE pipe to go through if double up the master services on a single box. I'm sure there should be a Thunderbolt solution to more network I/O to the mini but it may be easier to even out workload by splitting it.

As long as both master servers are up the secondary shouldn't get much traffic. Even if one master goes down the secondary would be able to handle it. If both fail then just deliver dimished service levels since limping along.

This wasn't done already because the OS X Server version not aligned (compatible) with the Active Directory versions ? Or just a significant project deferring? If the latter then doubling down on merger and AD coupling are probably best done as two separate project with substantive time go get back to "normal steady state" between them.

Back up of 12TB either will likely go to another "more than 12TB" box or to tape. The budget for backup is going to be significantly larger than some external FW drives.

If the secondary also has storage duties services then it probably would be good to have its storage outside the box also. The secondary it is just as likely to fail as the primary. What is unlikely is that they both internally fail at the same time. You may have to "pull and replace" either one. Yet another reason a third as a 'cold stand-by' ( which could stand in for either) works.

For example if two internal disks then each could be a clone of the "master"/"secondary" OS disks. Then substitution is a "boot to which OS volume" from a cold stand-by. That's a different mix than have all three active.

The knock on the mini's is going to be if a hard drive fails then you have power down time to replace. If the primary user storage is in external boxes where can do a hot swap of drives then negative that issue. The internal OS image storage failure risk can be reduced a coupe of ways.

 

mac mini server to promise pegasus works pretty well for your needs.