[geeks] Server Suggestions...

[Phil Stracchino]

Mark Benson wrote:
> I'm looking into purchasing a server to replace our venerable Dell
> Poweredge 1800 (it's not that old but it is very low spec and struggling
> with the load). The current machine is about 5 years old. I don't trust
> the hard disks past then at the very least. It's a single 3.0 Xeon HT
> with a whole gig of RAM. It's running SBS2003 and I hate it. I do all my
> dev on Open Source, and Windows Sever has a lot of crap we just don't
> need on it (Exchange and IIS being 2 fine examples). In order to upgrade
> and 
> 
> I require the following features:
> 
> A minimum of 4 cores and 4GB of RAM
> No OS (I intend to use BSD or Linux)
> Redundant PSU
> SATA drives (not SAS, our budget won't cover it)
> RAID-1 (or equivalent storage redundancy)
> Tower chassis or something I don't need a rack for (vertically oriented
> is better)
[...]
> I am asking because there are a lot of people on here that know a lot
> more about this than I do and this time I'm determined to get the right
> box for the job.

How important is it to you to get the whole thing in a single box with a
brand name matching the one on the case?  Because if you're not wedded
to having a single-source machine, in your place I'd look for the
specific parts and build the machine myself.  I'm pretty certain you can
get a case with redundant PSUs from Antec, though you may have to settle
for a rackmount case and stand it on its side if you want a tower
configuration.  (Just because the case is rackmountable doesn't mean you
have to put it in a rack.)  Pretty much any modern motherboard will take
a 4-core processor and multiple SATA drives, and do firmware RAID1 or
RAID5 across them.  (Possibly RAID6.)  If you want multiple CPUs, you
probably want to look at a Tyan board.  (Tyan tends to make more
server-oriented hardware anyway.)


> I also need advice on a backup system that will tolerate dust. DAT72
> doesn't, I doubt LTO will either. I am currently using an external hard
> drive but that's not ideal. It's a tricky one. We don't really have
> anywhere that's totally dust free. The server lives inthe cleanest room
> in the building and although it's not choked the server (it's quite
> clean inside actually) it's killing DAT72 tapes or drives (I think? I
> don't know for sure) in spite of me running the cleaning tape once a
> week.

DAT has always had a bit of a rep as a write-only backup medium.
Backing up to DAT is almost like not backing up at all, except for being
more time-consuming.  My LTO1 drive lives in an external case in a
regular room that it shares with people and cats, and I haven't had any
dust problems with it, but I have had to replace LTO drives at about
three-year intervals.  They don't last forever.  But what does?


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.