Koldov Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 Hi All, I have asked for a new server and been allocated about £2,500 out of next years budget, that sounded ok to me (but I have never bought a server) and as you can buy the basic tower for £400 ish, I thought I'd have enough to play with. Now having looked at the Dell website, I am concerned that might not be enough but I might just be overstating what I need (because I don't really know). I am looking at Server 2008 R2 (which Dell want over £600 for): Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Standard Edition, English, Incl. 5 CALs, No Media [add £637.00 or £43/month-1]. It will eventually take over the FMSO roles, be a DC and possibly be a test bed for me setting up SCCM or something similar. It doesn't 'need' to virtualise though. It will be a tower as we have nothing racked and our other server that will remain is a tower. That is 2008 (not R2) and holds print server, SIMS, staff and pupil data storage... So I need some advice on what to buy basically, not fantasy server time... Just a solid, reliable workhorse with hopefully some redundancy options, hot-swap drives/power supply if it's possible given the financial constraints... Kol.
ICTDirect_Dave Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 You can have one of my Z800 workstations with a 3 year warranty for about a grand. In fact why not take two and then you've got redundancy. I've done about 20 of these for local primary servers lately
cullingsh Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 What size school is this for? Don't but the O/S license from Dell, get it from a supplier (we use Phoenix but there are others out there). Cost for Server 2012 is around £100 and if you wish you can use downgrade rights to Server 2008 r2 (Current installs are Server 2012 with a 2008r2 virtual machine). The Junior and Infant schools I work in have this: Intel Motherboard Dual Redundant 750W PSUs Integrated Dual Port 1Gb Ethernet Intel Xeon 6 Core Processor E5-2420 1.9Ghz 15MB 95W 3 x Kingston 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC CL9 Registered Single Rank 1.5V DIMM 2x Toshiba 300Gb 6Gbps 10Krpm SAS 64MB Hard Drive 3.5 Inch 2.5 in 3.5 Caddy - for O/S mirrored drives 4x Toshiba 600Gb 6Gbps 10Krpm SAS 64MB Hard Drive 3.5 Inch 2.5 in 3.5 Caddy - for Data in RAID5 Samsung Black Sata 24 X DVD Writer Intel RAID RS2BL080 8 Port RAID Controller-6Gbps SAS/SATA 512Mb LSI2108 In-Built Remote Mgt Module 3 Years Onsite Next Business Day Warranty. Comes out at £3000 but depending on your situation can be customised, you could remove the redundant PSU, drop down the memory, reduce the hard drive capacity and have everything on the 4x600GB. The chassis is pedestal/rackmount combo. The quote was from Stone Group and is from 6 months ago, but you get the idea
cullingsh Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 I also have one infant school (30 ish computers) which has roughly the same spec as above but with 4 2TB SATA drives instead of SAS, brings the cost down remarkable to around 2000 I think
Koldov Posted March 11, 2014 Author Posted March 11, 2014 The school is quite small really, Junior level at the moment - about 400 students. At the moment it runs on quite old servers and that's fine for what we do, but there is no headroom to expand or try anything new or install space or CPU intensive applications like SCCM... Kol.
Roberto Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 I'd also suggest going for Windows 2012r2 - if money and time are limited then why not spend the money on something with a good, long shelf life which will be supported for longer, which should hopefully save you time on just having to upgrade it later. As much as I detest the start menu on 2012/8, its easy enough to live with/work around on a server OS.
StevieM Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 You can have one of my Z800 workstations with a 3 year warranty for about a grand. In fact why not take two and then you've got redundancy. I've done about 20 of these for local primary servers lately Is that the beast you were showing me in Manchester? That was a seriously nice bit of kit, especially for the price. Knocks our Fujitsu servers into an overly sized hat!
ICTDirect_Dave Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 Is that the beast you were showing me in Manchester? That was a seriously nice bit of kit, especially for the price. Knocks our Fujitsu servers into an overly sized hat! Yes mate, that's the one! Aint they just lovely
plexer Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 I am looking at Server 2008 R2 (which Dell want over £600 for): Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Standard Edition, English, Incl. 5 CALs, No Media [add £637.00 or £43/month-1]. Kol. As has been said get your OS licence from an educational supplier that would be the cost of a server licence to a business. Ben
speckytecky Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 Sent you a PM @ict_Dave You can have one of my Z800 workstations with a 3 year warranty for about a grand. In fact why not take two and then you've got redundancy. I've done about 20 of these for local primary servers lately
Graham-Millgate Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 I'd be more than happy to provide you with a quote. PM me and once I know requirements I'll get an engineer to work out some specs and look at current deals. £2500 should get you a decent enough bit of kit.
Fazza Posted March 11, 2014 Posted March 11, 2014 Check out ServerSource (based in Corby) they're Dell Refurbs with 3yr on-site warranty, we've had a few from them and they've been OK so far - only issue was a RAID battery failed and the next morning an engineer was on site and replaced it.
Koldov Posted March 12, 2014 Author Posted March 12, 2014 You can have one of my Z800 workstations with a 3 year warranty for about a grand. In fact why not take two and then you've got redundancy. I've done about 20 of these for local primary servers lately Is that RTB warranty? Is it 'as is' or are there options? Can you PM me a quote with all the specs please? Kol.
Koldov Posted March 12, 2014 Author Posted March 12, 2014 (edited) I'd be more than happy to provide you with a quote. PM me and once I know requirements I'll get an engineer to work out some specs and look at current deals. £2500 should get you a decent enough bit of kit. I'm not really sure of the requirements, actually that's what this thread was trying to find out! Feel free to PM some quotes for around that mark though if you can get near to the specs some of the others have posted. Kol. Edited March 12, 2014 by Koldov
Steve21 Posted March 12, 2014 Posted March 12, 2014 I'm not really sure of the reauirements, actually that's what this thread was trying to find out! Generally for our primaries (infants/juniors) we run about £1500 a Dell server. That's for 16-32GB RAM, middle of the road Xeon, and 4TB SATA raid5'd. Latest one we got for a school was as follows: Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1270v2, 4C/8T, 3.50GHz, 8M Cache, 69W, Turbo 32GB Memory (4x8GB) 1600Mhz Dual Ranked Low Volt UDIMM (speed is CPU dependent) (4) 1TB, SATA, 3.5-in, 7.2K RPM Hard Drive (Cabled) 5Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service £1,532.27 And then £120~ for Server 2012. I know it's not redundant/SAS etc as you mentioned, but generally we've found being close to our schools, and having the 5 Year next day warranty more useful And being infants/juniors personally I don't think they need the thousands and thousands spent. Steve
Koldov Posted March 12, 2014 Author Posted March 12, 2014 I know it's not redundant/SAS etc as you mentioned, but generally we've found being close to our schools, and having the 5 Year next day warranty more useful And being infants/juniors personally I don't think they need the thousands and thousands spent. Steve I know, I totally get that. At the moment little Johnny's Power Point or the X-mas play from 2003 isn't really pushing even the servers we have. But I guess I have to look forward a bit... I have no idea when I'm going to be able to get this kind of money out of the budget again and who knows what the future holds for the school and its IT... There are always rumours about some kind of big SIMS move to Discover, I personally would like to get in a system like Impero or SCCM (WDS, WSUS)... Maybe with a powerful enough server I could think about virtualisation, stuff that would have my current servers crying and rocking back and forth in the corner of the server room! Kol.
Steve21 Posted March 12, 2014 Posted March 12, 2014 Aye Always nice to have the extra stuff, but in reality I don't think you can beat a few smaller but still powerful servers for the small schools, rather than one epic monster. "Personally" I like keeping SIMs seperate to the main DC side etc. Can still do virtual servers etc with the smaller servers, just less per machine, but then twice as many (If that makes sense). Running WDS/WSUS/Software Deploy/Printer etc, doesn't really use that much processing, unless you're talking thousands of machines. Just my two cents Steve 1
Koldov Posted March 18, 2014 Author Posted March 18, 2014 (edited) OK, so I've just got this spec from the DELL website: PowerEdge T320, Intel® Xeon® E5-24XX v2 Processors, TPM 3.5" Chassis with up to 8 Hot-Plug Hard Drives Intel® Xeon® E5-2420 v2, 2.20GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 80W, DDR3-1600MHz 4 x 4GB RDIMM, 1600 MHz, Low Volt, Single Rank, x8 Data Width Internal Dual SD Module with 1x 1GB SD Card (WHY?) C16A - RAID 1/RAID 5 for H310/H710, 2 + 3-14 SAS/SATA/SSD HDDs, Max based on the Chassis PERC H310 Adapter RAID Controller 2 x 600GB, SAS 6Gbps, 3.5-in, 15K RPM Hard Drive (Hot Plug) - RAID 1 80GB Microsoft OS Partition Override, GPT Enabled 3 x 600GB, SAS 6Gbps, 3.5-in, 15K RPM Hard Drive (Hot Plug) - RAID 5 Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply (1+1), 750W DVD+/-RW, SATA, Internal On-Board Broadcom 5720 Dual Port 1GBE 3Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service I'm not sure what impact this will have as I will need to nuke it and reinstall my OS, but I have no option to remove it... Does it count as a Server COA that I can use? Windows Server 2012, Essentials Edition, Factory Installed, No Media £2,717.40 It's close enough I think to my £2,500 limit, maybe I could even talk them down a little? Anyhow, if you nice people could rip this apart for me, I'd be grateful... Kol. Edited March 18, 2014 by Koldov
snagrat Posted March 18, 2014 Posted March 18, 2014 Is RAID5 on 3 drives any good? I know it works but always thought 4 drives have best performance over 3.
Jasbo Posted March 18, 2014 Posted March 18, 2014 Internal Dual SD Module with 1x 1GB SD Card (WHY?) For hypervisor os to run from
Guest Guest Posted March 18, 2014 Posted March 18, 2014 2x 250gb for OS is more than enough. Should save you £100 or so. Spend that on 5 years warranty. Doesn't your LEA have a premier account? I know we've managed to get servers prices at £12k+ for around £8k with premier.
localzuk Posted March 19, 2014 Posted March 19, 2014 I'd recommend getting 1 more 600GB drive and switching to RAID 10 rather than RAID 5. For the difference in price, you'll get a decent speed boost, not lose any space and gain a bit better resilience.
Koldov Posted March 19, 2014 Author Posted March 19, 2014 Thanks guys, Didn't know about Hypervisor, maybe... one day... I guess it's nice to have the option... The drives were really in the spec due to price and considering the options. The list is bewildering, but I knew I wanted SAS over SATA, hybrid or SSD, but really although I could get away with smaller drives for the OS, the deal on pricing for the 2 x 600GB works out cheapest due to discounts (Save 20% on Hdd upsell) , for pure SAS drives they are cheaper than the 300GB models (smallest pure SAS drive they offer), other than that the choices are near-line, hybrid, SATA or SSD... RAID levels are a bit of a mystery, I do theoretically know the potential benefits of some and the pitfalls of others, but factor in network latency and the fact that the files won't be accessed by 'hundreds' of users I'm hoping it won't be an issue in the real world. Our current servers are RAID 5 and we've never had any issues with slow access times, but although there is an increase in resilience unless I get a better offer I have to do the best I can within the budget I have. Unless it's worth cutting back on CPU or RAM, but I feel that's giving with one hand and taking with the other... There might be a little more room to change things with other suppliers as I don't really know what DELL are charging in terms of Server 2012, SD card bay and such that I could probably do without, although it says 'included in the price'... But this is just a baseline quote to work from. I know it's not ideal, but we are coming from some pretty ancient servers and although they do the job well, it's time to move on a bit. The server spec is a bit of overkill as others have mentioned, I'm just looking for the best I can get out of the limited funds. Also there is the extra warranty to think of, so it's it is all a work in progress... Kol.
Koldov Posted March 25, 2014 Author Posted March 25, 2014 Module Description Show Details Add-in Network Adapter On-Board Broadcom 5720 Dual Port 1GBE Chassis Configuration 3.5" Chassis with up to 8 Hot-Plug Hard Drives Advanced System Configurations UEFI BIOS Setting RAID Configuration C17A - RAID 1/RAID 10 for H310/H710, 2 + 4-14 SAS/SATA/SSD HDDs, Max based on the Chassis RAID Controller PERC H310 Adapter RAID Controller Processor Intel® Xeon® E5-2420 v2, 2.20GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 80W, DDR3-1600MHz Memory Capacity 16GB RDIMM, 1600 MHz, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x4 Data Width Hard Drives (2) 500GB, SATA, 3.5-in, 7.2K RPM Hard Drive (Hot Plug) Hard Drives (2nd Group) (4) 1TB, SATA, 3.5-in, 7.2K RPM Hard Drive (Hot Plug) Internal Optical Drive DVD ROM, SATA, Internal Power Supply Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply (1+1), 495W OS Partitions No Partition, GPT Enabled Support Services 3Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service TOTAL :£2,496.60 Ok so I've taken on board the comments and gone for an extra drive and RAID 10 (but dropped down to SATA). Need some advice still on certain aspects: So, SATA... really? Makes me feel like I'm configuring a desktop... TPM UEFI instead of bios (apparantly for disks over 2TB)? I've never used it that I know of, any issues? Partition - GPT enabled (again a large disk thing)? RDIMM over UDIMM (I've read RDIMM is preferable but I can only configure this for 1x16GB stick and I'd rather have 2x8GB obviously)? Dual redundant hot-plug power supply is it really worth it? Thanks, Kol.
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