PeteHopton

A Good rule of thumb is that 1W left on is £1 per year. So if you've got 100W, on all the time £100 per year, if you've only got it on half the time then it's £50 per year. this works out at about 11p per KWh.

You need to look to contain and separate your hot and cold air, then use some extraction on the hot air, something a bit more 'industrial' than bathroom extractors! This will create a negative pressure in the room, now all you need in venting to get fresh air in the front of your servers. Important you block up the gaps in your cabinets.

At 3.2KW, you could easily fresh air cool that data room most days of the year. So why not put in some substantial ventilation and use the A/C as the backup?

Why not buy some near line SAS (seagate constellation ES) they aren't much more than SATA these days and you get the SAS command set.

If it were me, I'd save the VMWare money and get a hefty HA SAN setup, Starwind do a HA software SAN you can load onto servers or buy with hardware. I'd then use HyperV with an Enterprise edition server license, which will deliver all the enterprise functionality of HyperV, then buy in a few of the right system centre licenses and you've got a full suite of tools in an easy to manage environment (no consoles or command lines). A couple of hosts with some 2x12 core AMD opterons and a good load of RAM and these should handle most things you can throw at it, including a host failure.

Intel boards like RAM in certain configurations these days, think triple channel, a bit of RTFM and you can find out how it likes its RAM sticks.

I would suggest the biggest thing is the Virtual machine images, if you are using the laptop to test updates to server images and test server based changes before implementation then I'd suggest this is a good enough reason by itself.

Some Interesting Marketing by Stone, although I've seen people get far more that 5% off a Stone quote just by telling them "we're going with someone else."

OK, there is an easy way to achieve this, but it's not that cheap. Starwind HA Enterprise Edition will do this very fast and very reliably from a Windows based OS, I've been using it for years and can vouch for it. iSCSI SAN Software and Storage Virtualization Solutions They might do you an education discount.

I would suggest a vendor agnostic guide looking at different technologies, compatibilities and methods of achieving things. I have previously written a guide on SANs primarily looking at performance vs energy savings benefits for different tiered storage elements which was presented as JISC conferences, so I might be able to use some of this to help start things off. I see all over this forum 'xxx is good' but good for what, every technology has it's place and pro's and con's, things it should be used with, most products can be filed by 'technology' (actually a lot are rebranded boxes made in taiwan by a different, sometimes unheard of vendor).

Here are some tips: Go with cheaper 'near line SAS' disks, but a significant amount of read cache (32gb or so), this will save a lot of money and increase capacity and performance. You only really need the high rpm disks for intense database access. Get a unit that supports double parity RAID (raid 6) as there are problems running RAID 5 on large arrays. Make sure the machine has a good amount of battery backed write cache to overcome the write penalties associated with parity based RAiD. Get a unit you can manage easily, there are even windows based units on the market with starwind software which enables some nifty features, including high availability clustering. These are really easy to manage. Make sure you get some advanced redundancy features, redundant power, fans, nics, remember that if this unit fails, everything stops working (unless you get a high availability cluster). Consider the virtualisation support of the SAN, you might want to do some hyperV clustering or VMware in the future.

Liquid cooling can cool a lot more than air-conditioning, but with all of these things it's about specifying the equipment correctly, otherwise you will just be wasting your time, money and pushing up the energy bill. So how many watts or BTU have you get total? and how big is the room?

If anyone is interested, best bet is to contact one of VeryPCs resellers like @Millgate or drop VeryPC a line by the website and they will work with you to find a reseller.

Backups Are really important things, the last thing you want to happen is a few random read failures on restore and the backup fail. My tips are this: Use enterprise grade HDD only. The rate of read failure is usually one order of magnitude lower and the RAID command set will allow recovery of bad sectors 'on the fly' reallocating spare sectors and rebuilding the data from the RAID set. Low cost high capacity disks include RE4 from WD and Constellation from Seagate. Use a decent RAID card with a battery backup unit. Why? lets say you server fails due to a power and UPS failure. Was the disk based backup forced off too? if so, and it was writing data without a BBU, then the RAID can become punctured and your array will fail on restoring the server. Use a double parity RAID on all arrays greater than a couple of TB. RAID 6 can save your data, these days, a non-recoverable read error is actually quite a common occurrence, every 100 TB or so read and there will be a NR read error. Let's say your backup is 10 TB usable and in RAID 5, a single disk fails, The RAID card now has to computer through about 14 TB of read data to rebuild the array, one non recoverable read error and the operation fails. Do you fancy your chances 14%?

I am an AMD Fan, but the AMD desktop offering is nowhere near that of the Intel. AMD servers based on the 6100 chips are awesome value for money. This year you only want to get sandy bridge i3 i5 or i7, or if you're strapped for cash there are some new 'g-series' sandy bridge pentiums. Forget about discrete graphics, the new GPU on die will do everything you will want it to. Spec with 4 or even 8 gb of RAM, as it's cheap right now. Spec in a 'hybrid' HDD, effectively a normal 320gb HDD with 4 gb of SLC SSD cache in front of it. Depending on where you are based in the UK, additional funding may be available from the carbon trust or local authorities if you pick an energy saving model - have a look for the energy saving trusts 'energy saving reccommended'.