[UW-GIS-L] [Questions about requirements for ArcGIS_Server 9.2

[Harvey Greenberg]

We intend to upgrade our data server, and we have many questions about 
hardware and software purchasing, and about setup.

What we have:  We are running ArcIMS 9.0 on coal.ess.washington.edu 
(WinXP, IIS, Tomcat, Java) and ArcSDE 9.0 running under 
WindowsServer2003 with MS SQLServer on a 172 address 
(crusty.ess.washington.edu).

We want to install the new ArcGIS Server 9.2 on a machine on the 128 
domain.  (We won't risk touching our old installations of ArcIMS and 
ArcSDE until we have duplicated their functionality.)  We aspire to 
serve maps and to serve (like SDE) large datasets in read-only mode to 
ArcGIS Desktop users.  We are prepared to use passwords and other means 
to limit access to the capacity of a small machine. Does ArcGIS Server 
really replace SDE? It seems to more or less replace IMS, but the 
SDE-like part is still a mystery:

What we have tried: We have installed the .NET version of ArcGIS Server 
and (free) SQL Express on an XP machine for testing (using IIS for web 
services). The map server (functionality more or less replacing IMS) was 
fairly easy to set up and use (though it's mysteriously broken at the 
moment) but we can't get the data server ("GIS resources" -- which would 
presumably replace SDE functionality) to work. Also, the ArcGIS Server 
installation never seemed to indicate a necessity for a RDBMS so the SQL 
Express is not in use.

If I want to serve a dataset ("GIS resource") via ArcGIS Server like I 
do currently with SDE, does it really have to be in a DB or at least in 
a file-GeoDB, or can it just be, say, a lone TIF lying there in a directory?

Do we still need a RDBMS like SQLserver or Oracle in order to serve 
large data sets?  I read somewhere that ESRI file geodatabases are 
faster than SDE/SQL.  Is this even true? If so, true across scales?

If we don't need a DBMS, should we try RedHat linux?  That would involve 
using the java version of ArcGIS Server rather than .NET.  We hope that 
would not be as "complicated" (flaky) as running Java and Tomcat with 
IMS 9.0. We have a general fear of a more difficult installation so 
wonder if anyone has experience or advice. If we use Windows, do we want 
Server2003 or can we get away with XP and IIS? (Can we please not use 
Vista?)

Do we need MS Server2003 to run SQLserver? (I think we do.... 
In any case, perhaps a better question for techsupport than UW GIS-L?)

How much money do we need for that? (Is there a UW price for 
SQL? We inherited the SDE machine with Server2003 and SQL so we don't 
know what that costs. Again, perhaps a better question for techsupport?)

What are the chokepoints on our system?  Would it be CPU speed, number 
of cores, bandwidth, local disk access (or fileserver access if we 
choose that route?), memory speed, memory size, or some subtle feature 
of our chipset?  How do people monitor the chokepoints on a functioning 
GIS Server system?

We have been shopping the Dell website, and found a sweet core2Duo 
Optiplex for cheap.  The Precision line seems beefier than we need, or 
is there something about Xeons or their chipset that is important for 
this sort of server?

Thank you for reading this entire message,
harvey and charles


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hgreen at u.washington.edu  374 Johnson Hall 206-685-7981	
http://gis.ess.washington.edu/

Charles Kiblinger  http://staff.washington.edu/cek/
cek at u.washington.edu  v206.685.7981  f206.543.0489
Johnson 374 | Box 351310 | University of Washington | Seattle WA 98195