Atom setup capable of this?
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We're branching out into a whole new arena here and I need some advice. Customer is installing 50/10 Comcast connection in college apartment buildings. 40 units in each building with 1-2 ethernet ports in each apartment. I know a dual core atom board will handle the throughput, but thinking about the possibilities of bittorrenting and QoS and whatever the hell college kids do, should I look at something beefier? No captive portal will be needed initially, but the possibility is there. If a dual core atom won't work, can you recommend something else in a 1U setup?
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You'll want a good sized state table on that box for sure to handle the possibility of tons of residents bittorrenting. Bittorrent will eat up so many connections.
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That is one of my main concerns. I'm looking at putting 4GB of ram into the atom setup if I go with that. I did notice some DL360's selling on eBay for under $300 with dual Xeons and 4GB of ram as well. I'm leaning towards the DL360 setup at this point as it's server-grade hardware and the conditions these boxes are put into service might not be ideal environmentally.
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If you aren't partial to HPs, a bunch of Dell 1750s go on eBay a lot for low prices.
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I've got a few 1750's sitting around not doing much of anything at one of our offices. I might see what the specs of them are.
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I wouldn't know why an Atom-based server wouldn't be sufficient for this kind of setup. Modern Atom boards take up to 4GB of memory, so IMHO would scale well enough for theis type of scenario. I guess 2GB would be sufficient even. Of course a regular entry level 1U server will probably be cheaper, especially if you have something laying around somewhere doing nothing. The only real advantage of an Atom-based server is dat it probably roughly uses less than half the power a normal 1U server does. If power conspumption is not of your concern, then there's no need looking at an Atom-based server of course.
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I got a bit more information, the initial building has 15 units in it, each with a homerun run down to the main data closet. I'm thinking a vlan for each unit (they have 5-8 ports/unit off a distribution panel installed in each unit) and then a 24-port switch with vlans configured.
Also, these units will be in non-climate controlled environments at times, so that is another variable. It's around 90 degrees Fahrenheit down here now so the closets could get up to 120 degrees at times.
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To give you an idea (and I would not use this as a conclusive study)
I run a celeron 1.33ghz system with 1gb ram and a 500gig hdd (smallest enterprise drive I could get brand new easily) - running about 5 clients around my home.
For reference the board info is here: http://resources.mini-box.com/online/MBD-I-D201GLY/intel-d201gly-power-consumption.html
The drive is a seagate, only reason I chose it is my partner (g/f) explodes whenever the net goes down for any reason at all and because the motherboard + sata adapter can only handle a single drive, I expect it to last a while.When running squid with 250mb (very excessive) worth of ram cache, snort, and traffic shaper, and a few torrents, I'm running 2500~ connections/states - Which equates to a total of about 30% (give or take about 2%) memory usage. CPU load peaks at about 8% but usually stays around 2-4%.
I have set pfsense up for 500,000 states, but I sincerely doubt that I will reach this. I do want to test with Vuze(which seems to be the worst, with lots of states if you use the ono plugin) but I suspect even with that the box won't even break a sweat.
If you suspect torrent usage I highly recommend the traffic shaper. No matter how heavy the connection is being used, it's nice and speedy for browsing/mail etc.
For some comparative numbers, the 1.6 ghz atom is about 70-80% as fast as the celeron while using a little less power.
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I ended up buying a HP DL360 off ebay for a bit over $200 with 2 75GB scsi drives, 2x3.4Ghz Xeons, 4GB ram, and dual PSU's. I'm going to up the states in PFSense and definitely use QoS for this test model.
I've got a meeting with the apartment buildings owner next week where we will hammer out the details of the setup.
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Also take a look at building a system from the Supermicro X7SPA-HF Atom ITX board.
It has:
Atom D510 (Dual Core)
2 x Intel Gigabit LAN
Up to 4GB RAM
IPMI "Lights Out" management.I currently have one with a SATA-> CF adapter and it's great! No moving parts. I'm also using VLANs and everything works well.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H&IPMI=Y
Thanks!!
Riley