New Server Spec

[plexer]

I'm looking into purchasing a new windows 2003 file server and the following spec:

S1 Dell PowerEdge 2800 Floor Standing unit.
Dual Xeon 3.0GHz
2MB/800FSB Processor.
4Gig RAM (4 x 1Gig).
6 x 146Gig Ultra 320 Hot-Swap SCSI 10k Drive.
CD-ROM.
Floppy Drive.
Perc4 d/i 128MB RAID Controller.
Redundant PSU.
Dual 1Gig Ethernet controller.
Keyboard/Mouse.
Raid/server manager
3-year 24 x 7 x 4 same day on-site support.
Shipping to site


Is what I've been quoted on so far at £2939.00
Plus a UPS for it.

I'm also thinking about going for a 2TB Buffalo Terrastation located in another comms cabinet across site and doing disk to disk backups to it.

Any comments good or bad?

Ben

[Geoff]

Have you considered AMD instead of Intel? HP, Sun, IBM, etc all do decent Opteron based server systems.

[Nij.UK]

also if you are willing to go down the AMD route, then NEC do decent spec servers aswell.... sometimes you are able to get them cheap, cause they have then made and if a customer pulls out.

worth taking a look at

[ChrisH]

When we get some money I would like to look into getting a SAN rather than another file server as the amount of storage we need is growing alarmingly every year and although the initial outlay would be higher it would allow more flexibility to build it up over time.

[plexer]

I will have a look at AMD at the moment we are a complete Intel shop.

Also was wondering with the dual processor for a file server am I better off going for a faster single processor or do the dual processors still help?

Will look into a SAN.

Ben

[Geoff]

File serving isn't a cpu intensive task usually (obvious exceptions are Bittorrent, http and Rsync). So CPU doesn't really matter too much. Much more important is your server's i/o performance. In practical terms this means network connectivity, network card, disks and disk controller.

[CyberNerd]

File serving isn't a cpu intensive task usually (obvious exceptions are Bittorrent, http and Rsync)

on-access virus scanners too

[Chafftech]

File serving isn't a cpu intensive task usually (obvious exceptions are Bittorrent, http and Rsync). So CPU doesn't really matter too much. Much more important is your server's i/o performance. In practical terms this means network connectivity, network card, disks and disk controller.

Agree with Geoff on I/O. You could possibly change the HDD for 15k rpm to increase through put on what will be a fairly large RAID (5?) array.

[Geoff]

File serving isn't a cpu intensive task usually (obvious exceptions are Bittorrent, http and Rsync)

on-access virus scanners too

Don't do that on servers. You can safely rely on your client machines on-access scanners and nightly scheduled scans.

[StewartKnight]

plus the more memory the better with a server

[Geoff]

True, assuming the server knows how to use it. I can't speak for windows based ones but Linux servers load files into ram and server commonly used stuff from that. Ram being faster than disks means it speeds things up considerably. Obviously you want to encourage this as much as possible so the more ram the better.

[john]

15K disks are a must, 10K is soooooo last millennium. Also don't bother with Dual Cores unless you have mulah to burn, I just run mine on standard 64bit Xeons, they have HT technology so you get the "2 for the price of 1" as standard. Cannot comment on the Dell build quality, but I looove my HP servers (hate my HP desktops)

[DMcCoy]

Hyperthreading can only help a bit, I'd much rather my dual xeons were dual core opterons, then I would have 4 cpus I missed out on dual cores as the appeared a little too late.

Hyperthreading might add 40% boost at most, dual core perhaps 80%.

I'm not sure I see the point in 15k rpm drives, they are very expensive (says the man with FC drives :P). If you really want max performance you would hardly be using raid 5 now would you?

The sustained throughput on my primary file server is still not very high, even virtualised it is more than capable of the file requests it gets.

[john]

I have found in my useage that the 15K drives seem to improve performance, especially if using in RAID 5. My fileservers are in RAID 5 with 15K disks in now, and when I used them with 10Ks they were good in performance, I cannot argue with that, but now they have the 15Ks in the same hardware platform, they do seem faster to serve, now who knows why, but they do seem to make a difference. When I quoted for disks for my HPs I think the 10Ks were actually more expensive at the time!

[Geoff]

Hyperthreading is very useful on a server. It works quite well with the type of workload a server usually has to deal with.

Pointless on a desktop machine though. You'd be much better off with dual cores.

Agree with 15k rpm disks and Raid5. SATA vs SCSI is probably an interesting debate to have though.