SDSS-III Mirror Site Hardware Page

This page provides information on hardware needed to support a SDSS-III Catalog Archive Server (CAS) mirror site.

Recommended Hardware Configuration

We generally recommend that the Web server and database (DB) server be separate boxes, especially if you're supporting a large user community (100 or more). For the webserver, any Windows box with Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 (or later) running on it will do. If you plan to support the CasJobs or ImgCutout services, you will definitely need a separate webserver with ASP.NET v2.0 or later installed on it.

We don't recommend any specific vendor etc., but our DR8 DB servers at JHU have the following hardware configuration:

• Intel Xeon 8-core CPU E5440 @2.83GHz 16GB RAM
• Network Adapter: Broadcom bcm5709c netxtreme ii gige
• RAID controllers: PERC 6/e s (2)
• Disks configured to RAID 5 with 2 logical volumes of 8.2 TB each and 2 dedicated TempDB volumes. Each hard drive is 700GB @10000 RPM.

All MyDB databases are hosted on 2 database servers, one of them being online at any given time. Our current MyDB server configuration:

• Intel Xeon 8-core CPU E5440 @2.83GHz 16GB RAM
• Network Adapter: Broadcom bcm5709c netxtreme ii gige
• RAID controllers: PERC 6/e s (2)
• Disks configured to RAID 5 with 1 logical volume of 8.2 TB and 1 dedicated TempDB volume. Each hard drive is 700GB @10000 RPM.

For DR9 (and beyond), we have added 4 new DB servers with a different configuration optimized more for increased storage:

• AMD opteron(TM) 2-core CPU 6134 @2.3GHz 32 GB RAM
• Network Adapter: Broadcom bcm5709c netxtreme ii gige
• RAID controllers: PERC 6/e s (2)
• Disks configured to RAID 5 with 4 logical volumes of 4.5 TB each. Each hard drive is 1TB @10000 RPM.

For our production cluster we have 3-4 db servers per release, so that the public and collab users as well as CasJobs users can be adequately supported, and skyServer, ImgCutout and CasJobs queries can be load-balanced on different boxes. We dedicate one server to ImgCutout queries for multiple releases, since these queries can be quite large in number and intensive.

At any given time, we have 2 or more DB servers in production per release, and the rest are used for testing and data loading purposes. Quick and long queries are pointed to two separate servers. One of the two MyDB servers will be in production and the other one is used for warm backup (MyDBs are bakced up daily to the backup machine).

For a mirror site, you may not need the full configuration described above unless you want to ensure a high level of performance for multiple levels of access across a large user community.