On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Marc Rouleau wrote:
On the other hand, NetApp tells me that the highly random nature of my traffic -- typical ISP work including email, USENET news, and webservers -- should point me toward multiple servers to maximize main memory cache hits.
Our experiences (we're the third largest ISP in Sweden) say 'always use dedicated servers when possible'. You shouldn't mix up mail with news with webservers, etc. It can, if you're unlucky (and one usually is) completely ruin performance and it always makes administration harder. This goes both for data storage servers like NFS servers and the actual (web,mail,etc) servers themselves. The simpler a configuration is the less likely it is you'll run into unforeseen problems and performance bottlenecks. And if you do run into trouble, it will be much easier to resolve if the server does only one thing.
Of course, it all depends. If you don't have much traffic it might be impossible to warrant buying multiple NFS servers to have one for each kind of stuff you want to store. It depends on your situation.
Regards,
/Ragnar, Algonet/TNI