File Server hardware requirements???

[dummkauf]

I hope this is the right area for this post, but if it isn't let me know and Ill repost in the correct forum.

I am trying to figure out what kind of hardware to use for a linux(Gentoo) file server I am building for work. First off I work for a small Imaging company, we scan documents for law firms or other large companies, database the images, and ship them back. We have about 10 workstations with scanners attached to them, all scanned images will be written directly to the file server. During the day almost all scanners are being operated as well as other non-scanning workstations viewing/processing images from the server. The majority of the files being written to the server are black and white tiff files, and occassionally large color tiff projets.

This also needs to be able to scale to twice the number of scanners writing images to it within the next year or 2 as we are growing at a very rapid rate.

I realize that investing in fast HDs(probably SCSI) is going to be a necessity, as well as a large amount of memory but what I am wondering is what kind of processing power will I need to keep up with this kind of load?? The software suite we use for this will be installed on a seperate server and configured to write data to this file server, so this server only needs to be able to handle the files. No applications other than the OS and Samba will be running on the server. I am also planning on connecting the application server and this file server directly via a Gigabit crossover cable.

Also, price is a major concern as this is a small but growing company that has a very limited budget, so I may have to sacrafice my SCSI drives for some SATA raptors..........any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

I also have a JBOD server with 1.5 terrabytes of storage on my network and was wondering if using rsync to backup this new file server to the JBOD would be a good idea or if some other backup method would be better suited. This backup would be performed at night. We do operate 24 hours a day but our overnight shift is very small and the load on the server is cut in half,if not more, at night.

[cokey]

if you are going for pc-style, 386 compatable then I wouldn't go with anything less than 1mb of cache, what is probably better is to get processors with dual cores each with their own 1024kb of cache. That can markedly increase performance because it cuts down on bottleneck from other things like RAM and HDD access. Also you would be better off going for one of the processors that has a memory controller in the chip itself (AMD64 San Diego core or FX)

So the processors for x86 variants i would suggest would be Xeon, Athlon64 San Diego, Athlon64 FX. Out of those the dual core Xeons and Athlon 64 X2 probably represent best value for money, the Athlon 64 FX is a true monster but they are big bucks.

If you were going for proper hardware i'd suggest IBM's Power5 or variant of the pSeries servers, they only run AIX and linux so you would be able to put Gentoo on it easily.
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