Recomendations for new server £2K budget!

[Mattkirk]

Morning,

Looking to purchase a new server . . . . .

Primary school

Looking to run 2008 R2, AD, DNS, DHCP and Sharepoint.

Have approx £2K to spend....

ANY IDEAS???

[AIT]

Morning,

Looking to purchase a new server . . . . .

Primary school

Looking to run 2008 R2, AD, DNS, DHCP and Sharepoint.

Have approx £2K to spend....

ANY IDEAS???

including os? how much storage? i was going to sugest a low spec machine.. (ml310 G5) link HP ProLiant ML310 G5p Tower Server - Misco.co.uk
leaving lots of money left over for drives etc


however you have said sharepoint. so you are idealy looking at sas drives and a decent box.
(ml350 G6) HP ProLiant ML350 G6 Tower Server - Misco.co.uk

leaving a bit ofr drives and memory.

[jamesfed]

Rack or Desktop mounted?

[Tricky_Dicky]

I'd put the Sharepoint on a separate box personally.

The basic curric server doesn't need much power for a primary school and if you need a lot of storage for the endless amount of photos that some teachers seem to take I would say get a good NAS to handle that.

[dhicks]

Looking to run 2008 R2, AD, DNS, DHCP and Sharepoint.

Split the machine up in to virtual machines. Your best option is probably to use the built-in virtualisation in Windows Server - get the Enterprise edition, that'll let you run 4 virtual machines, then you can have one for your DC/DNS/DHCP, one for Sharepoint/file server, one print server and one general application server.

For server hardware, we have several Dell T105s. Despite what it might say on the Dell website, the case will fit four harddrives if you take the CD drive out. Get a base system with a quad-core processor (then you'll have 1 core for each of your VMs) and a single harddrive. Buy extra RAM from Crucial and three more harddrives from eBay (cheaper that way), install Windows on the single harddrive and set up a RAID-5 storage array on the three others. Spend any extra money on getting a faster (maybe SAS?) harddrive with the machine and a hardware RAID controller.

--
David Hicks

[Mattkirk]

OK...

Rack mounted is preferred . ..

All OS license's are taken care off, so none required.

Storage could be SAS or SATA or even SCSI....


Dell - I did price one of their servers up but havent used Dell in a long time..

Virtual - Had also thought of going down this route but have not played with it before, I have got 2008 Enterprise with Hyper V to load onto it.

The more advice the better..

Thanks

[jamesfed]

Give these guys a call - BT Business Direct - IT hardware, Servers, Networking, Licensing, Business services

[Edu-IT]

Give these guys a call - BT Business Direct - IT hardware, Servers, Networking, Licensing, Business services

Or you could try some of our forum sponsors?

CPLTD Computer Products Ltd | Computer Hardware | Desktop PCs | Laptops | Notebooks | LCD | Software | Printers | Servers | Wireless Networking | Office Supplies | Ruckus Wireless | Meru Wireless

WStore - http://www.wstore.co.uk/

and I'm sure there are others.

If Dell desktop machines are anything to go by then the servers will be just as good. We recently took out some that were in the region of 10 years old!

[jamesfed]

Or you could try some of our forum sponsors?

CPLTD Computer Products Ltd | Computer Hardware | Desktop PCs | Laptops | Notebooks | LCD | Software | Printers | Servers | Wireless Networking | Office Supplies | Ruckus Wireless | Meru Wireless

WStore - WSTORE – The IT Partner for Business – 105,000 products, £400m Stock - Next Working Day Delivery

and I'm sure there are others.

If Dell desktop machines are anything to go by then the servers will be just as good. We recently took out some that were in the region of 10 years old!

Sorry didn't think of that one - and here I am always promoting my own website for the same reasons at work!

[korifugi]

however you have said sharepoint. so you are idealy looking at sas drives and a decent box.
(ml350 G6) HP ProLiant ML350 G6 Tower Server - Misco.co.uk

leaving a bit ofr drives and memory.

I've just recently bought one of these for ALOT less than 2K - with 5 250GB SATA hotswaps in for good measure.

Just make sure you get the memory upgrade for the raid card if you're planning on running raid5.

VERY nice piece of kit - I can highly recommend, have a word with Simon at CPltd (He'll probably be along in a second now I've invoked his name!) and he'll be able to hook you up with a nice price.