The Sentinel Rapid Deployment server components run on x86-64 (64-bit) hardware, with some exceptions based on operating system, as described in the Section 2.1.1, Supported Operating Systems. Sentinel is certified on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon hardware. Itanium servers are not supported.
This section includes some general hardware recommendations for Sentinel system design. Design recommendations are based on event rate ranges. However, these recommendations are based on the following assumptions:
The event rate is at the high end of the events per second (EPS) range.
The average event size is 1 KB.
All events are stored in the database (that is, there are no filters to drop events).
Ninety days worth of data is stored online in the database.
Storage space for Advisor data is not included in the specifications in Table 2-2 and Table 2-3.
The Sentinel Server has a default 5 GB of disk space for temporarily caching event data that cannot be immediately inserted into the database.
The Sentinel Server also has a default 5 GB of disk space for events that cannot be immediately inserted into the aggregation event files.
The optional Advisor subscription requires an additional 1GB of disk space on the server.
The hardware recommendations for a Sentinel implementation can vary based on the individual implementation, so it is recommended that Novell Consulting Services or any of Novell Sentinel partners be consulted prior to finalizing the Sentinel architecture. The recommendations below can be used as a guideline.
In SLES version, the database is embedded with the Sentinel Rapid Deployment server and is installed on the same machine along with the server.
NOTE:Because of high event loads and local caching, the Sentinel Server is required to have a local or shared striped disk array (RAID) with a minimum of 4 disk spindles.
Table 2-2 Single Machine Configuration (up to 2000 eps)
Table 2-3 Three Machine Configuration (up to 5000 eps)