Richard Walker

Since my clientele are varied and I store a fair bit of sensitive data, my office workstation/server setup is pretty neat, with Cisco gear managing (and securing) a very busy internet connection, hardware RAID5 for data security and redundancy, and a 3-disk RAID0 array to allow for some serious data crunching. My aggregated setup represents just over 15GB of RAM, roughly 3 terabytes of storage space, 10 CPU cores, 6 displays, and *lots* of caffeine.

In terms of software…. apart from a single install of Windows XP on my main workstation, everything is Linux. I always stick to either Ubuntu/Debian (for workstations/servers respectively) or Gentoo. If a client uses a specific environment, I’ll have that loaded up in a VM in either Virtualbox on my workstation, or KVM on my server.

A few things on my wishlist include ditching my 7200-rpm RAID0 drives in favour of 15,000RPM SAS drives, a Mac Pro with dual 30″ displays for my development front-end, a dual CPU, 8-core Xeon VM host for handling multiple virtual environments (6GB of RAM and a Q6600 Core2 doesn’t quite cut it anymore) and a fiber-fed SAN loaded with 15krpm SAS storage. One can dream.