Re: Advice Required On Purchase Of New Servers
Quote:
Originally Posted by AngryITGuy
I have been handed the task of purchasing some new member servers for the school on a shoestring budget!
The new servers of which there are to be four in total are to be used as print servers, storage for staff data and for use with the edexcel online examination software.
Looking through various server manufacture websites it seems most of them are offering a choice between SAS and SATA hard disks which is what is causing me the dilemma.
From what I gather the SAS hard drives will offer better performance and greater longevity than the SATA hard disks but this seems to come at a premium of about 3 times the price of the equivalent SATA disk. And this will no doubt eat into my shrinking budget as I need these servers to last as there is a good chance they will be the last servers I buy.
The problem I have here (and I guess I am not the only one) is that the school will have BSF knocking on the door in 4 years time and the head wants to spend less money on IT as each year passes. I am dreading to think what the IT budget will be like in 3 years time!
I guess what I want to ask is does anyone out there have SATA disks in their server and are they reliable and is performance hindered?
Any advice and recommendations would be gratefully appreciated.
Many thanks in advance
Ultimately there isn't a great deal to choose between the two for most situations.
As always take into account your affordability, and fit the right product to the task(s) that the server needs to carry out. If maximum disk space in a compact form factor is your concern - go with 146gb 2.5inch SAS disks. But that's a pricey option and the more cost effective solution are 250gb SATA II's..
For your print servers look at the cheaper SATA disk option. Or better still wheel out that old 700mhz Pentium III server I'm sure you've got lying around somewhere.
You may have to go with SATA again for your filer requirments if you need 1TB+ of useable disk. the 146 or 73 gig SAS are a better option but you may not be able to afford, say, 6x 146gig disks in a RAID 5 and you could still be short of space.
Re: Advice Required On Purchase Of New Servers
It would be a waste of the server to use 2 as print servers, unless you have 100's of printers
We have 80 odd network printers and one server copes fine with it. The same server also runs Sophos and acts as an IAS server and no slowdown whatsoever
Re: Advice Required On Purchase Of New Servers
Quote:
Originally Posted by sidewinder
It would be a waste of the server to use 2 as print servers, unless you have 100's of printers
We have 80 odd network printers and one server copes fine with it. The same server also runs Sophos and acts as an IAS server and no slowdown whatsoever
I'll join that too. Where I worked previously they had 2 print servers which served roughly 1000 printers across the site... They were dual xeon machines too, not even dual core.
Re: Advice Required On Purchase Of New Servers
@ sidewinder
You are right it would be a total waste of the two servers to use them just as print servers in a school environment.
The two servers will initially be used as print servers. Because we are a split site school the eventual plan will be to store the network apps on the servers before they are rolled out to workstations within each building.
And as is the norm they will eventually be used for much more than they were ever intended!
Re: Advice Required On Purchase Of New Servers
Im in a similar situation to the OP.
We're planning a server upgrade here, im unsure on a few things tbh.
Im planning on, for the moment:
2x quad/4Gb/2x73Gb Domain Controllers. Providing redundancy for AD/DNS/DHCP/ect;
1x quad/2Gb/2Tb RAID5 SAS Fileserver. To store home/profiles on.
1x quad/2Gb/4Tb RAID5 SATA Fileserver. To backup the file server and DCs.
1x old server to function as print, WSUS & App Deployment Server.
1x old server to function as SQL server for Sims.net
1x old server to function as ISA.
2x old modified NAS as spare Tb storage.
Although im a little unsure on the specs. I definatelly want the new servers to be quad cores, overkill, yes. But im thinking for future usage and potentially VM usage.
Memory, again, prehaps overkill on the DCs, but more the merrier i say.
Storage wise im unsure.
Our current curric server has about 600Gb of storage, of which 250ish is free. Add to that about 100Gb of admin stuff, that makes 450Gb of actual data over our two networks.
So on the main fileserver, we could probably get away with just the Tb of space on it. Meaning more backups could be stored on the larger backup fileserver.
Im unsure though.
Thoughts?
