new main server

[ICT_GUY]

I'm having a bit of a nightmare with pricing a new server up.

At the moment I have a budget of around the £2k mark.

I want (possibly) to buy two servers for this, a second cheap HP like the one I already have (£300) rackmounted bargain that it is (quad core 2 gigs of ram).

So the main server needs to come in around £1500 - 1800.

I have come up with this so far.

dabs4work - HP Rack ProLiant ML350 G5 Xeon 5420 2500-2x6MB/1333 (458240-421)

Why?

It supports 3.5inch sas and sata drives has an insanely fast cpu but lacks memory.

To populate it I need to get some cheap but fast HD's, say 4 x raptor 300gig drives @£166 each.

total cost £1800 for near a TB of storage (raid 5).

Memory will add another £70 to the cost.

I would welcome your thoughts. My main concern is with the drives, but they are reliable, and they are cheap and I can buy spares. SAS seems to cost lots for small drives, SFF SAS seems mad, at even more $$$$$ and less storage.

[ICT_GUY]

bump, please.

[contink]

I'd recommend giving Dan a call at SCL and see what they can offer you... I had some quotes for similar stuff but had to go with cheap HP Proliants because of a budget issue.

They may be able to offer you somethng close to what you're after or at least give you an indication if you're on a wing and a prayer.

[ICT_GUY]

SCL Online - X-Serve 300GT - Single Quad Core Xeon 5405 2Gb 2x 500Gb SATA

Ok result, seems to be very similar and cheaper, and since we will be buying around 50 pcs from them for suite and the classrooms, it would seem to be the way to go.

[contink]

Aye.... and no call centers when (edit: I mean IF it all goes wrong.. Glad to help.

[srochford]

SAS gives much better throughput if you're doing things like SQL databases, Exchange etc. It's less important if it's just sequential throughput (eg something which you just use for backups)

[ICT_GUY]

Looking into the SCL sever, my main concern is that it uses standard 500gig seagate drives.

Advantages is that at £51 each I can put a load in and swap when they do go bad.

Disadvantages i'm going to need a stack of spare drives and they are no where near the quality of the raptors and certainly not even close SAS.

Its going to be down to money, and what is going to give me less grief.

[john]

I'm sure the SCL ones are good but if your hankering after the big names, try hunting around for the drives.

I find they vary soooo much in cost and if you play the big names suppliers off against each other you can make great savings Saved £60 a disk last time by playing 3 off against each other!

[Elky]

Looking into the SCL sever, my main concern is that it uses standard 500gig seagate drives.

Advantages is that at £51 each I can put a load in and swap when they do go bad.

Disadvantages i'm going to need a stack of spare drives and they are no where near the quality of the raptors and certainly not even close SAS.

Its going to be down to money, and what is going to give me less grief.

Hi ICT_GUY. We can build the server to your spec so if you want to change the drives to something of your choice then let me know and I'll get a quote sorted for you. Same goes for CPUs, RAM etc - we build them from scratch anyway so will tailor it to your needs

Regards