Introduction

This page attempts to answer a recurring question. Can you recommend a WebCT server configuration? The answer is yes.

The College of Engineering and Science at Clemson purchased a Dell PowerEdge 4200 in the summer of 1998 and a Dell PowerEdge 4300 in the summer of 1999. Both servers came with Red Hat Linux installed at the factory. This combination of hardware and OS has been extremely stable for us. We followed a typical scenario of purchasing a production server, and then a year or so later purchasing a new production server and converting the old server to development status. We use our development server for beta tests, training, and also as a RealServer. We currently have about 200 WebCT courses and 12,000 student users on our production server.

I  recommend three Dell PowerEdge 4400 configurations below based on the following considerations.

• Why save a few bucks on a mission critical server. I went with dual processors and 1 GB of memory.
• I used the fastest processors available as of this date and an expandable (4x256) memory configuration. You can drop the price by about $1600 by going with the slowest processors and a nonexpandable (8x128) memory configuration. Don't do it.
• The cost difference between 9 GB and 18 GB disks is $170 per disk. I did not consider 9 GB disks. The performance characteristics of the 18 GB and 36 GB disks are the same. The three configurations are 6-18 GB disks, 8-18 GB disks, and 6-36 GB disks, configured as RAID 1 + 0, also known as RAID 10. These configurations have a capacity of 54, 72, and 108 GB, respectively. The 8 bay backplane of the 4400 can be split into two halves. A RAID 0 array of 3 or 4 disks is installed on one half of the backplane. The data stored on this array is striped for performance. A matching array of 3 or 4 disks is installed on the other half of the backplane. This second array is a mirror of the first array (RAID 1). RAID 10 arrays provide a good balance between performance and reliability.

• RAID 10 disk capacity 54 GB: $13,533 + tax.
• RAID 10 disk capacity 72 GB: $14,533 + tax.
• RAID 10 disk capacity 108 GB: $16,661 + tax.

Options

• Monitor 15" ($169)
• Tape drive: 20/40GB DLT4000 internal (add $1529)
• Tape drive: 35/70GB DLT7000 internal (add $3654)

Thanks to the following for help putting these configurations together: Guy Youngblood, Buck Marchant, and Laurie Price, Dell; Brian Morgan, Marshall University; Mark Plaksin, University of Georgia.