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Server Recommendation
- Thread starter QUADPUMP
- Start date
NickFerrar
MIS
Tricky without knowing the app requirements really.
It's probably a bit overkill unless they're heavyweight apps but I'd go for:
PowerEdge 2600
1 x 2.8GHz Xeon CPU
1GB RAM
3 x 36GB 10k hard drives (giving about 65GB usuable once formatted and in RAID 5 set)
PERC controller
RAID 5 drive config
DLT1 or LTO-1 tape drive (depends if you think you'll need more disk space now or in the future)
3yr silver 24x7 warranty
You can buy a rackmount kit for the 2600 to if you have a server rack.
It's probably a bit overkill unless they're heavyweight apps but I'd go for:
PowerEdge 2600
1 x 2.8GHz Xeon CPU
1GB RAM
3 x 36GB 10k hard drives (giving about 65GB usuable once formatted and in RAID 5 set)
PERC controller
RAID 5 drive config
DLT1 or LTO-1 tape drive (depends if you think you'll need more disk space now or in the future)
3yr silver 24x7 warranty
You can buy a rackmount kit for the 2600 to if you have a server rack.
6+ Users?"
Look at Dell's "Poweredge SC" line. Anything else is extreme overkill in your situation.
PE 400SC
2.4Ghz P4
512MB RAM
RAID Controller
2x40GB IDE drives (RAID 1)
TR40 Tape Drive
About $1400 with their 3yr NBD on-site service.
Add about $500 if you want Windows SBS 2003.
Let me reiterate: Anything else is overkill.
Look at Dell's "Poweredge SC" line. Anything else is extreme overkill in your situation.
PE 400SC
2.4Ghz P4
512MB RAM
RAID Controller
2x40GB IDE drives (RAID 1)
TR40 Tape Drive
About $1400 with their 3yr NBD on-site service.
Add about $500 if you want Windows SBS 2003.
Let me reiterate: Anything else is overkill.
NickFerrar
MIS
How can you say that without knowing what the app is? You don't scale app servers purely based on numbers of users accessing them, much also depends on the app involved (Oracle-based etc).
Certainly if it's disk-bound a non-SATA IDE mirror is going to choke, these days you'd also be foolish to spec less than 1GB in an app server - domain controllers are the only things we use with 512MB now.
Certainly if it's disk-bound a non-SATA IDE mirror is going to choke, these days you'd also be foolish to spec less than 1GB in an app server - domain controllers are the only things we use with 512MB now.
Nick,
I agree with your statement "tricky, without knowing the app requirements" and didn't see the need to reiterate it.
That said, I'll bet you ten bucks he's trying to spec a file server for a very small company. "A couple of applications are used by 3+ users writing to server regularly" doesn't exactly give me the impression he's planning on deploying resource intensive services, and certainly not Oracle.
As far as your suggestion about the minimum amount of RAM to spec a server with, I agree with you for the most part, but it flies in the face of your general advice to know your application. I won't spec and buy something today unless I'm absolutely sure I'm going to need it. When I'm testing and find out that I didn't spec enough RAM for the system, I'll buy more then (and have the advantages of really knowing how much memory the task requires, and taking advantage of ever-falling market prices) before the system goes into production.
I've got a mail gateway that handles 80 users, does spam and virus filtering, hosts mailing lists, hosts a company chess server (don't ask,) runs squid to proxy for said 80 users, and also handles a few other minor tasks. It's got 256MB of RAM in it, and has no issues because of that.
Overkill is just as bad for business as a server that's not up to the tasks facing it.
I agree with your statement "tricky, without knowing the app requirements" and didn't see the need to reiterate it.
That said, I'll bet you ten bucks he's trying to spec a file server for a very small company. "A couple of applications are used by 3+ users writing to server regularly" doesn't exactly give me the impression he's planning on deploying resource intensive services, and certainly not Oracle.
As far as your suggestion about the minimum amount of RAM to spec a server with, I agree with you for the most part, but it flies in the face of your general advice to know your application. I won't spec and buy something today unless I'm absolutely sure I'm going to need it. When I'm testing and find out that I didn't spec enough RAM for the system, I'll buy more then (and have the advantages of really knowing how much memory the task requires, and taking advantage of ever-falling market prices) before the system goes into production.
I've got a mail gateway that handles 80 users, does spam and virus filtering, hosts mailing lists, hosts a company chess server (don't ask,) runs squid to proxy for said 80 users, and also handles a few other minor tasks. It's got 256MB of RAM in it, and has no issues because of that.
Overkill is just as bad for business as a server that's not up to the tasks facing it.
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