General hardware questions...How much is enough?

[Guest]

[biased99]

Hi all,
1st post, so be nice! 

I've been running IPCop for quite a while here at home (originally on a P233/128Mb/6Gb box, now on a P4 1,8/512Mb.40Gb box). I have the standard 3-nic set up (Green/Orange/Red), and I began thinking about offering a service where I would re-use older Desktop machines and rent these out as appliances to small businesses. Of course, IPCop, whilst reasonably good, isn't a Unified Threat Management device out of the box, which is where Endian comes in...

I've bought another P4 desktop, which I plan to fit with an IDE RAID controller, and mirror a  of 20 or 40Gb disks. I feel that this "should" be OK as an appliance for a small business (up to ~20 users). It's similarly specced to the one mentioned above, and I'd like some advice as to whether this would be suitable, esp. if theusers were also using VPN connections...

On the other hand, I've bought a larger Server which I'd ultimately like to deploy in a business supporting ~200 users. This one is an IBM X236 SCSI-based Server, running a single 3.2GHz Xeon CPU (dual-capable), 1Gb RAM (might be adding some more), dual gigabit NICs, and currently has 2 x 36Gb, 10,000RPM SCSI disks in a hardware mirror (I plan on adding 2 more disks and setting up 3 in a RAID 5 with a hot spare). Do you guys reckon this kind of machine will support some heavy usage in an environment of 200 or so users?

Thanks in advance. Oh, and Hi! 

[ShadowCore]

Hi, this is also my firt post so i'll try to contribute with you in a topic that i'm also interested.

I've been an Endian user for about 2 years, and Endian is the primary line of defense at my job. I have 50 "heavy users" and a Pentium III 1Ghz with 512Mb of ram seems to be more than enough. In fact if a check the system graphs, the CPU utilization never exceeds the 10%, and de memory usage is around the 60% (cached memory included), but take in fact that i only user "light services" like the firewall and time server among others.

My guess is that with this hardware and services configuration Endian can easily handle around 100 users, but if i enable heavy services like the proxy-cache, we'll be needing to upgrade to a 3Ghz CPU, 1Gb of ram, and a 7200 rpm HD. If we talk abou 200 users with proxy enabled, add to this a raid 0 array to speed up the caching, but the CPU power and the ram may be enough.

It will be great if a more experienced users can tell us something about their experiences.

Have a nice day!