Need help: Software for a heavly used server

[benkillin]

I work for the University of Virginia's ITC division as a web developer. I found out a few days ago that we are planning to upgrade our server to an awesom hardware cluster of 2 HP blade machines for our production server and another 2 machines for our development server. My boss asked me to get a list of pros and cons to upgrade the software to something more reasonable than what we have been using in the past.

Before the servers were based off of AIX using extremely outdated software: Apache 1.3.22, PHP 4.2.3, and mysql 3.

My boss and I want to put this software on the new server: a Linux OS (I prefer a deiban based distro like Ubuntu because of the ease of software installation using apt-get) Apache 2, PHP 5, Mysql 5, Ruby and Rails, and FastCGI.

I need every positive detail documented so my boss's boss can present her boss with the proposal that will convince them to do things our way instead of their way with these new servers. So far I have these pros documented:

mini-Cluster:
FAST access
downtime minimal
can handle the growing number of requests (Our current website is around 12,000 pages, about 1000 of which are active content (perl, PHP, cgi, etc...))

Ubuntu OS (I'm pusing for Ubuntu, but any debian deritive would be fine by me):
Easy program installation and upgrades using apt-get
active development community; new version of OS every 6 months
easy to work on
huge software repositories
Lots more pople know how to use Linux better then AIX (bringing increased productivity)

Apache 2:
less security concerns
more features
... that's all I can think of right now

PHP 5:
Better Object Oriented support, you can use almost all features of inheritance
more features
... that's all I can think of right now

Mysql 5:
more features
faster
... that's all I can think of right now

Ruby and Rails/FastCGI:
Fastest language to develop in (both in execution time and development time)
beatuful use of CRUD
easy to maintain code
... that's all I can think of right now

As you can see, my list is quite short.
Could somebody please help me expand this list? It is important to me that they agree to this proposal because it will actually make my job FUN if we have all this cool software and hardware to develop on.

Thank you in advance for anybody that will help me.

[BobLennon]

benkillin wrote:

I work for the University of Virginia's ITC division as a web developer. I found out a few days ago that we are planning to upgrade our server to an awesom hardware cluster of 2 HP blade machines for our production server and another 2 machines for our development server. My boss asked me to get a list of pros and cons to upgrade the software to something more reasonable than what we have been using in the past.....

Sounds to me like your bosses might have given this a lot of thought as well and that they might want to make a case for more expansion and budget.

And although I'm not sure that the software you have been using is unreasonable (bureuacratic emphasis notwithstanding), I think your appeal for this case is being directed to the more technical community, rather than the more broader aspects of what it takes to make a compelling case for effective business operations.

Perhaps the best answer might come from a real study of what is going on within the software side, and how to improve things without giving great emphasis about what the PHP forums have to say about software processes that most respondents would have no familiarity with.

Just another two cent thought...