There is a discussion going on among some IT folks I know concerning how many servers are best for a certain scenario and I wanted to get the collective wisdom of this group. This is the scenario: XYZ Engineering company has a large regional HQ office that is home to approximately 125 engineers. The engineers are using softwares that generate large data files, this software includes CADD software, Modeling software, and Structural Analysis software as well as a standard support staff using the MS Office suite. 4 regional branch offices also have connectivity to these servers for data sharing among the offices. The office currently has 3 data servers with each server serving a particular logical area, for example one server houses CADD files, one houses modeling data, one houses office data, etc.
One side of this debate believes that it would be best to consolidate all the data on one server. This reduces hardware costs and provides one backup point and less confusion among data points. The other side of this debate believes that by distributing the data among several servers that there is a natural load balancing of data IO at the disk array and the network interface and that several points of failure exist rather than one. In other words, if all the data were on one server and this server failed everyone in the office is out of work until it is fixed, if there are three servers and one fails, only one third of the staff is out of work. All advice, comments, and snide remarks are welcome:
Thanks,
David
