I am a consultant and I am looking for some direction on fast file searching.
We have a client who is having a third party scan, organize and copy to CD files that are proof of delivery for shipments. We copy this cd to a shared network drive on a 4 processor PIII-500 machine running NT4 on SCSI raid 5 hard drives. It is also the PDC for the domain and also runs our Exchange server (yes, I know, but we didn’t get to install it…)
They give us small .tif files (60-80K). We are creating about 100 MB of files on the system a week. This is about 3000-5000 files per week. Each week’s worth of files is kept in it’s own directory.
I would like to move this over to some other server that does nothing but store and serve the files.
They use these image files daily to send to their customers for proof of delivery. We are currently using just a simple file find on each workstation of the shared network drive to find the files we need to fax or email to the customer. Theusers put in as much of the file name as they need, which is usually a portion of the truck number or the invoice number to find all .tif image documents pertaining to that invoice or document. This takes some time, but not too objectionable at this point. However as we grow this bunch of images, we will of course have to slow the search down.
We are looking for long term solutions to finding the files faster.
How about RAM disk on 5GB of memory set aside on a new server?
How about Ultra 3 SCSI disk storage?
Any add in card solutions for virtual hard disks?
How about a REALLY fast file name searching utility?
Would Linux on the data storage system help here?
How about a(n) NAS?
If we put in another server, would multi processors help?
What about the network speed? Where exactly does the searching happen? Is there a client/server alternative?
