New Server

[dhicks]

> Has anyone built a server recently? I'm looking to replace our admin

> server. Doesn't need to be Deep Thought. A 2.8GH Pentium 4 should

> do it. Any recommendations for a mobo? The plan is to backup to

> tape, is there an efficient, cost effective alternative to Veritas? I've

> never got NTBackup to work with AIT drives.

 

Yes, I spent the summer building "servers" out of any random bits of computer equipment that happened to be lying around the place. This was only cheaper because we already had some bits available, though - buying a server off Dell was a lot less palavar and probably just as cheap.

 

Tape backup: personally, I don't get what's so good about tapes. I figure it's just as cheap, and a lot easier, to use caddied SATA harddrives - removeable harddrive caddies are £30 or so, and harddrives now go up to 1TB in size.

 

Processor: Our Dell server came with two 4-core processors and 4GB of RAM. That's effectivly 8 512MB machines in one (well, kinda, ish...). Works very nicly as a thin client server, and should work just as nicly as a server to run virtual machines on. Smoosh all your existing servers into one piece of hardware!

 

RAID: We bought the SATA 2 harddrives for a 3 element RAID 5 array off of eBay rather than buy them from Dell with the machine. The machine's OS is running on the super-fast SAS drive that comes with the machine, though.

 

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David Hicks