Student dorm hardware suggestion
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Here is student dormitory with around 100 students. Average download data is 100 gigs per day with 16 M +8 M load balanced modem. I decided to to control my network with all in one solution so need an hardware advice for me. I also need to cache dormitory network. Students usually hang out same pages or videos at internet so will need squid proxy. My base requirements are load balanced network with squid proxy not tons of nat or firewall rules. My questions for experienced users nearly have same story.
1. Is Supermicro's A1SRM-LN7F-2758 (8 Core) http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SRM-LN7F-2758.cfm board suitable for my system with 64 gig ram and 6 terabyte or 8 terabyte hdd.
2. Above board is an atom board, should I use Xeon board instead of atom?
3. Should I use SSD instead of HDD for fast cache at squid process?Or any other tip for me?
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1. Is Supermicro's A1SRM-LN7F-2758 (8 Core)
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SRM-LN7F-2758.cfm board suitable for my systemI would more go with a Intel Xeon E3-1240v3 system.
with 64 gig ram and 6 terabyte or 8 terabyte hdd.
16 GB to 32 GB would do the job in any reason for you, using Snort, Squid & SquidGuard, SARG, pfBlockerNG
and perhaps on top this VLANs & QoS. This might be running for a really long time.2. Above board is an atom board, should I use Xeon board instead of atom?
I would do it. Gigabyte GA6LS-LI, Xeon E3-12xxv3 and 16 GB RAM if this might be enough
for your installation.3. Should I use SSD instead of HDD for fast cache at squid process?
If the Squid should be running as a caching proxy this should be the best option for you.
Fast, power saving and heat preventing!Or any other tip for me?
Take a really strong Intel Xeon E3-12xxv3 @3,0GHz and AES-NI inside for better VPN (IPSec) performance
and a really huge and big SSD likes a 512 GB one. If you need more or you should talk about a RAID system
you should considering it not to run all in one box! Then perhaps a Linux System with CentOS and Squid might
be the better way. -
Here is student dormitory with around 100 students. Average download data is 100 gigs per day with 16 M +8 M load balanced modem. I decided to to control my network with all in one solution so need an hardware advice for me. I also need to cache dormitory network. Students usually hang out same pages or videos at internet so will need squid proxy. My base requirements are load balanced network with squid proxy not tons of nat or firewall rules. My questions for experienced users nearly have same story.
1. Is Supermicro's A1SRM-LN7F-2758 (8 Core) http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SRM-LN7F-2758.cfm board suitable for my system with 64 gig ram and 6 terabyte or 8 terabyte hdd.
2. Above board is an atom board, should I use Xeon board instead of atom?
3. Should I use SSD instead of HDD for fast cache at squid process?Or any other tip for me?
Per my experience, also some other people's experience on Squid cache (you can also take a look to their forum), your system would be an overkill.
8 years ago, I built a pfSense 1.0 with squid proxy to serve my 70 office users with a Pentium 4 + 1GB ram machine, internet speed was 10M, it worked very well.
My colleague built another one to serve factory in China, 150-200 active users, 5M + 2M ADSL dialup internet, the pfSense machine was a core2duo with 2GB ram, served at least 2 years (yes, until I quit the company, nothing gone wrong)
There was a rough formula on how much memory you need for squid: about 50-70KB per active connection + + 10M per gig of disk cache + a few gigs for cache (yeah, now we might give up the disk!). In squid forum I saw someone running a squid cache server with 1000 users (expecting a double in 1-2 year) and his machine was equipped with 16GB ram only.
And CPU power, is not a big deal for squid since caching doesn't really involving lots of calculation, a faster disk I/O (if you decided to use a disk) does matter. Of course all these are based on an assumption that you are doing regular forwarding proxy (i.e. caching only) but not intercepting proxy (one example is anti-virus scan).
So I assume all 100 users are having 10 connections each simultaneously (which is already a lot if no BT), the memory for squid connections is still far less than 1G, and you can set a 4-6 GB ram cache for squid (good enough), with another 4GB ram for OS and other stuff, 16GB ram for you is already too much.
For CPU, definitely your C2758 is a good one, in terms of benchmark it's faster than some i3 processors, probably the little brother C2558 will do the job nicely.
SSD will do a better job on your system because random read/write speed affects the delivery of cache contents.
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Thanks for all valuable suggestion, I will think and choose a way. :)