News Server Now Running on a More Powerful Machine

 

Henry Wong

If you are a frequent News user, you might have noticed that recently, there is a significant improvement in performance when accessing newsgroups on the CityU central News server. It is due to the switching of our News server from the older SunSparc 20 to the more powerful Sun Ultra Enterprise 6000 server. Ultra Enterprise 6000 is the fastest network server currently installed on campus. The relocation exercise of the News server has obtained the following benefits:

1. Better performance in terms of process allocation and speed of retrieving news articles from the News server.
2. Larger storage capacity for the rapid growth of newsgroups and news articles coming from around the world. At present, a total of 12 Gigabytes disk space is allocated for storage of the news data. The capacity can be expanded easily in the future when needed.
3. The huge storage capacity allows news articles to stay on the server for longer time.
4. The server is equipped with built-in redundancy which can tolerate power, cooling or storage failures without affecting system operations. Recovery from most other failures such as CPU faults can be accomplished with minimal disruptions.

The change-over process of the server was completed at the beginning of March.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk