Is this more then i need?

[westleya]

Back up will be a 1TB NAS device

 

What about your off-site backups ?

 

Your server is more than enough for 100 clients. If you only have one DC then spend money on redundancy (2 x PSU's, good RAID, decent warranty and tape backups) rather than raw power.

[mac_shinobi]

We have just been quoted £2000 for a quad core Xeon HP ML125 (?) with 4 500Gb SATA drives with one spare (from memory) and 4GB memory

Please be very wary of going for any more memory - if you go up we have been told by more than one supplier that we would have to go up to the 64 bit operating system and printer drivers and some primary school software - specially the old stuff we seem to specialise in won't work with it. So we are sticking to 4GB for now with the ability to upgrade in future

Don't forget that SAS drives are quite a lot more than SATAs so you must take that into account.

Check your warranty - We have 3 years on the server but it doesn't cover the drives.(only emerged in the course of a discussion)

 

They do make RAID versions of SATA drives that are meant to be more reliable and arent that much more expensive.

 

So might be worth while looking at those sata hard drives ( most likely stating the obvious but thought I would point it out )

[Tricky_Dicky]

Looks like a good machine.

I'm in a 3 form entry primary as well and they are eating up hard drive space at the moment so get as much as you can. One of the Assistant heads has just discovered the delights of filming the assembleys....

 

Rich

[SYNACK]

The old 32bit for printer drivers is not really a good excuse anymore with the virtualisation rights on all of the Windows server line for current licenses. You have rights to one physical copy and one virtual copy of even server standard so you can put the physical box onto a 64bit OS and just put the usually unstable legacy junk like printers onto a small virtual 32bit copy of the OS.

 

On drives you can get server grade SATA ones but SAS is vastly faster given that most are now dual port and run at a minumum of 10,000 RPM (15,000 RPM also avalible) rather than the 7,200 RPM of SATA.

[witch]

Thanks for all that - I can't afford SAS drives so I have gone for the SATA but they are raided. I will check re the warranty.

As for the info about RAM - very interesting - I shall be looking into that. I will be using Server 2008 if that makes a difference

[enjay]

I don't think I understand the question: There exists the possibility for a computer system that is too fast?

 

Definitely. If you need a car to get you to the supermarket twice a week, down residential roads or ones with heavy traffic, then a Masserati is probably not the car of choice. Same goes for PCs - they can be higher-specced than is necessary/appropriate for their use.

 

Little-Miss' server sounds about right though, and is comparable to the spec we've just ordered for the new server for our similar-sized network. As others have said, since this is the only server on site, don't scrimp on redundancy. Also consider teamed network cards.