I haven't exactly been writing too much in this blog lately, but been busy with quite a lot of other things. The funds management company I'm working for has merged with another funds management company and I've started working for our covered bonds department in addition to funds management.
But now that summer is here I've managed to find some time for some fun, too. And this, obviously (for people that knows me it should be fairly obvious anyways), includes time spent working with computers and programming of such. The thing is, my server farm didn't cut it anymore, as Gamma was pushing the limits of it capacity. Beta is old enough as it is and Alpha is all the way in Ã…lesund doing its job nicely so I try not to overwork it too much.
This prompted the addition of a new server in the server farm, but first, lets recap the existing farm:
Gamma
For those who don't know already, Gamma is the primary server in my apartment in Oslo, it is Dell PowerEdge 1900 with a Xeon 5110 1.6GHz/4MB CPU and 2 GB of RAM consisting of 6x 750 GB drives in a RAID-5 setup contributing an efficient storage capacity of 3.4 TiB to the network (the rest of the overhead is ext3 overhead and system partitions).
Gamma serves DNS, as well as runs the SKS keyserver keys2.kfwebs.net as well as most other tasks on the LAN.
Beta
Beta is the oldest computer in the farm, aging back to 2001. It has a graphical setup and is used as workstation in Oslo. The CPUs are Dual PIII 1000 MHz and it has 1 GB of RAM and about 1 TiB of non-redundant storage. It is the router on the network and as such provides both a firewall, DHCP server and a squid transparent proxy.
Alpha
Alpha is the primary web and email server and is hosted on dedicated line in Ålesund. it runs the sks server keys.kfwebs.net as well as DNS. The server is a Dell PowerEdge SC1420 with a Intel® Xeon™ prosessor (3.00GHz, 2MB cache, 800MHz FSB) and 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (2×512MB 400MHz DIMMs). It has a 73GB SCSI Ultra320 (10000rpm) 1′’ 68 pin drive.
Delta
This brings us to Delta. Delta will be an addition to Beta and Gamma in Oslo and has a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 Yorkfield 2.66GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor, 8 GB of RAM and 16 x 1TB drives in a RAID-6 setup with two redundant drives. This adds about 12.7 TiB of storage to the network (again looking away from system drives on the server itself)
To sum things up, running Monte Carlo simulations on this farm is rather quick.
