Server and Back-up hardware

[ITgirlInProgress]

Hello everyone,

 

I am working on a university project where we have to change the existing print and file servers + add back-up server.

 

The file server will support 1000 students (users), each of them will use at least 15GB of memory space + 100 professional users, each will use at least 20GB.

The printer server will support 20 network attached printers.

All users use the service only if the have log-in.

For the back-up: we need one incremental for every day and one full back up per week.

 

so we will have to buy file and print server, storage, and back up server.

 

My questions:

1) Which specifications should I look for when choosing the file and print servers? (how much RAM, etc??)

2) How much storage do I need for the back up server? (just to calculate the storage that all the users will use or to buy a bit extra just in case?)

3) Can you suggest a brand for all the hardware? (PS the file and print servers will run the Microsoft Windows server operating system)

 

Thank you in advance!

[localzuk]

What retention do you need for the backup? IE. How many weeks?

[ITgirlInProgress]

At least 4.

[dhicks]

The file server will support 1000 students (users), each of them will use at least 15GB of memory space + 100 professional users, each will use at least 20GB.

 

SSD drives might be a realistic option here. 16TB of data isn't that much these days - if a 1TB drive is £500, and a 24-slot rackmount server around £3,000, £15,000 would get you a 22TB RAID6 file server. I/O performance should be really good - you'll need to specify a good RAID card (might well be £1,000) and a 10 gigabit (or greater) network connection, assuming the network infrastructure is up to it.

 

With the print server, the bottleneck for print jobs is again is likely to be disk speed - larger print jobs will need to be spooled to disk, so the faster the harddrive the better, and again a 10 gigabit network connection would be useful. Actual disk storage space probably isn't that important, so a couple of mirrored 1TB SSDs should be more than enough. We run our print server as a virtual machine, so hardware resources are shared with other servers, and performance seems fine.

 

1) Which specifications should I look for when choosing the file and print servers? (how much RAM, etc??)

 

If you were using ZFS with block-level deduplication, the recomendation would be 3-5GB of RAM per TB of disk space. This would mean a minimum of 72GB of RAM in your file server - these days, a perfectly reasonable amount, we have 96GB in one of our servers at a cost of under £1,000.

 

2) How much storage do I need for the back up server? (just to calculate the storage that all the users will use or to buy a bit extra just in case?)

 

You can buy a 12-3.5"-disk-bay server and fill it with 4TB SATA drives for £3,000, that's 40TB in RAID6. Use that to mirror your file server and do snapshots every hour, cutting those down to per day after a week or so. Mirror those backups to a cloud backup providor - Google now charge £6 per TB per month, which is very reasonable.

 

3) Can you suggest a brand for all the hardware? (PS the file and print servers will run the Microsoft Windows server operating system)

 

If you can;t build the servers yourself, I'd probably use Dell, although I'm not quite sure if they actually offer a 24-port SSDserver at the moment, check HP's website too.