What should I buy

[apoth0r]

Would be well worth looking into, I mean you've already paid for it if it does exist, why reinvent the wheel?

 

(sorry I'm not up with the current BGFL stuff)

[ServersPlus]

We're an EduGeek sponsor, specialising in servers and networking.

 

If you're pretty sure of what you're looking for now, or if you'd like someone to come out and do a free on-site survey to identify your needs and propose an ideal solution, we'd be happy to send one of our engineers out to you.

 

If you're interested, drop me an email or a PM.

 

Thanks

[Duke]

Have you used Exchange before? The main reason for going for it is the use of shared calenders and resources. It also allows excellent mailing lists and controls.

 

+1 If you haven't used it then Exchange really is a great product. I'm no Microsoft fanboy, but if you're in a Windows environment and have a lot of users and you want everything to 'just work' then Exchange is a really excellent email server. Under the educational pricing it's extremely cheap as well. I know schools who use third-party hosted email services (LEA or otherwise) and we hear about a lot of problems. In a school that relies on email like ours, there's no way I'd consider outsourcing it.

 

As far as the storage server goes, SATA drives are probably fine (bear in mind most SANs will use SATA) for a small- to medium-sized site. If you're planning on having a lot of simultaneous users then by all means consider SAS.

 

We're a secondary school with 1600 users / 800 PCs and this is the spec of our 'resources' file server (will be migrating to a SAN in coming months), bearing in mind it's a a year and half-odd old:

 

Dell PowerEdge 2950

5x Seagate 15k 146GB SAS

2x Quad Xeons @ 1.86GHz

8GB RAM

2x 1Gb Network (Trunk)

 

The CPU and RAM are overkill for a file server (they were originally specced for a different purpose), but they rest of it should fairly solid. Take a look on the Dell site and use their configuration tool to find something that matches your price. I'm sure if you post up a spec people here will be happy to look over it. I'd personally much rather go for a Dell server with a 3yr warranty than start building my own stuff with Raptors (David's right, they're awesome drives - but I'm not sure I'd put them in a server).

 

Cheers,

Chris