[geeks] Server Suggestions...

[Lionel Peterson]

I'd go with a SuperMicro barebones system, they are easy to work with  
and are really "server grade" DIY boxes.

The chassis are great, but the MBs are pricey, but all server MBs are  
pricey IMHO - you should be able to piece together a real nice box  
with room to grow for 2000 GBP.

Lionel

On Jan 29, 2009, at 7:18 AM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> 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)
>
> The server currently is used for:
>
> File Sharing to Windows boxen
> MySQL 4 (may upgrade to 5)
> PHP 5.2.x
> Apache 2.x
> Ruby on Rails (which is hell in Windows)
>
> It serves to 8-10 clients and the CPU power is mostly required for  
> heavy
> database lifting. The RAM requirement is to allow plenty of headroom,
> and RAM is cheap so I may as well grab it while it's there. I  
> thought 1
> GB was loads in 2004 and it turned out to be wholy too little.
>
> 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.
>
> Budget is 2000 GBP.
>
> 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.
>
> That has a separate 500 GBP budget (restrictive I know, but we are  
> only
> small).
>
> Any advice is very welcome.
>
>
> -- 
> Mark Benson
> http://markbenson.org/blog
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