Recently my boss asked for my recommendations on upgrading our woefully lame DNS and DHCP servers. I proposed BIND 9 and ISC/dhcpd under FreeBSD or GNU/Linux, on internally redundant Intel based servers. Pretty predictable so far. However, the mucky-mucks suddenly have their hearts set on an "appliance" solution. Basically, this is the same technology, except on less robust hardware. To regain that robustness, you have to buy them in pairs and cluster them. At that point, you are talking $14,000 for a DNS. This is insanely expensive for what amounts to a pair of old desktop with two NICs and no video. The only added value is a web configurator for the services. From the spec sheet, it seems pretty well secured, assuming all the packages are up to date.
The mucky-mucks' logic is that my solution ignores total cost of ownership. How they determined the TCO of my solution is beyond me. We already have all the expertise in house to build and maintain my solution, so there shouldn't be any added FTE's or consulting involved. Basically, what they mean is that by buying a pre-packaged solution, with a support contract, they can fire anyone they want without worrying about lost skills. That solution may or may not yield a competitive TCO, but it definitely offers a predictable TCO. I can't give them a fixed number, so I can't argue on TCO grounds.
That got me thinking, what if I could present an undeniably cheaper solution? Something that (like the appliance) ran on low end hardware, required little to no expertise to install and configure, and came with neat graphic utilities for the network guys to manage the services. One answer jumped right out: OS X server on iMac. I mean, the little guy is basically an embedded system with a CRT.
We can get blue iMacs with OS X Server and AppleCare for $1168. OS X itself is trivially easy to support. And once we unplug the CRT, the iMacs will sip electricity at less than 1/3 the rate of the "embedded system" the big-wigs favor Personally, I would be more than satisfied with these boxes running with cloned cold stanbys. I mean, DNS includes it's own redundancy via secondary/tertiary lookups. If one DNS goes down for a few minutes it is no big deal. Likewise, we use 14 day, infinitely renewable DHCP leases, so a short DHCP outage effects very few systems.
However, the mucky-mucks will never see it that way. So I can't make this (professionally suicidal) argument unless I can produce a hot standby, high-availability solution for OSX. There are a few technical issues due to the single NIC, but I think I can work around them with multiplexing and careful vlan-ing. If not, I can implement the private network over 802.11b.
So has anyone worked with a high availability solution for OSX? So far the only package I have found is Wackamole, which I have never used. I would need some testimonials and advice before attempting this.
The mucky-mucks' logic is that my solution ignores total cost of ownership. How they determined the TCO of my solution is beyond me. We already have all the expertise in house to build and maintain my solution, so there shouldn't be any added FTE's or consulting involved. Basically, what they mean is that by buying a pre-packaged solution, with a support contract, they can fire anyone they want without worrying about lost skills. That solution may or may not yield a competitive TCO, but it definitely offers a predictable TCO. I can't give them a fixed number, so I can't argue on TCO grounds.
That got me thinking, what if I could present an undeniably cheaper solution? Something that (like the appliance) ran on low end hardware, required little to no expertise to install and configure, and came with neat graphic utilities for the network guys to manage the services. One answer jumped right out: OS X server on iMac. I mean, the little guy is basically an embedded system with a CRT.
We can get blue iMacs with OS X Server and AppleCare for $1168. OS X itself is trivially easy to support. And once we unplug the CRT, the iMacs will sip electricity at less than 1/3 the rate of the "embedded system" the big-wigs favor Personally, I would be more than satisfied with these boxes running with cloned cold stanbys. I mean, DNS includes it's own redundancy via secondary/tertiary lookups. If one DNS goes down for a few minutes it is no big deal. Likewise, we use 14 day, infinitely renewable DHCP leases, so a short DHCP outage effects very few systems.
However, the mucky-mucks will never see it that way. So I can't make this (professionally suicidal) argument unless I can produce a hot standby, high-availability solution for OSX. There are a few technical issues due to the single NIC, but I think I can work around them with multiplexing and careful vlan-ing. If not, I can implement the private network over 802.11b.
So has anyone worked with a high availability solution for OSX? So far the only package I have found is Wackamole, which I have never used. I would need some testimonials and advice before attempting this.