Server make recommendations

Does anyone have a particular reason to favour one server make over another? I'm currently looking towards Dell but would appreciate some feedback on the experience of others.

p.s. looking for a tower server rather than rack

All depends on how much you want to pay. If it's for business use the initial price shouldn't be a huge concern. (If it's for home use I'd get something second-hand off eBay, or just use, or build, a standard PC.)

We always used to buy IBM. I was tempted into buying a Dell once; then I realized why I always bought IBM! (In three words - after sales service.)

You looking for new? and do you want rack mount. I know where there are a good number of surplus ones available, mostly SuperMicros (which are worth a look too).

Personally HP all the way, but not everyones budget runs to that.

Drop a spec in here and I'll give you my 2p.

Thanks, it's for a small charity (so price is important) to run SBS with exchange and sharepoint. The spec I was looking at from Dell was a T300 tower for �745 with:

Base Quad Core Intel� Xeon� X3353, 2.66GHz, 2x6M Cache, 1333MHz FSB
Memory 4GB FB 667MHz FBD (4x1GB dual rank DIMMs) for 1 CPU
Optical Devices 48X DVD/CDRW Combo Drive with SATA Cable
1st Hard Drive 250GB, SATA, 3.5-inch, 7,200 rpm Hard Drive (hot-plug)
2nd Hard Drive 250GB, SATA, 3.5-inch, 7,200 rpm Hard Drive (hot-plug)
Raid Connectivity C11- Add-in PERC6i controller, 2-4 hot-plug Hard Drives - RAID 0
Chassis Options Chassis with Hot Plug Hard Drive and Non-Redundant Power Supply

I wouldn't do RAID 0 unless you have a robust backup regime. If you're after performance use SAS disks instead and back off the processor spec.

In reply to:

---

price is important

---

Depending upon how important uptime is to you you should consider the fact that Total Cost of Ownership is not directly related to purchase price. The reason that I recommended IBM, rather than Dell, in another post is a reliability issue. We had very little downtime with any of our IBM servers and any problems were resolved by IBM within a few hours. The one Dell server that we purchased was a completely different affair. We kept having problems with it and Dell support were most unhelpful. After many days of downtime I eventually resolved the problem by contacting our sales representative at Dell (we also bought desktops from them, which I would recommend) to say that I would never buy another Dell server. At that point they supplied a replacement; needless to say I never did buy another Dell server.

I understand your point about RAID 0 but I don't think SAS driver are really within the budget. Two 300gb SAS drives and controller adds about �500 to the cost with Dell. Could think about reducing the size to 146gb which adds about �250 to the price.

Thanks, I'll have a look at IBM ones. Initial price is important at the moment since the way the charity's income works with restricted and unrestircted money. The costs for this is coming out of restricted funds which can only be spent on specific things, we basically don't have any unrestricted to spend as we wish and so there's quite a tight ceiling on how much we have to set up the office.

If you do RAID0 in a business / commercial environment then frankly you are mad!

can you economise on the processor and use a single fast 15k rpm drive as the OS / swap drive and less speed critical large data volume on 7200 SATA300 drives ?

OK, some quick thoughts.

1) This is an SBS server running exchange and sharepoint. ie - a BIG single point of failure, if this box dies the business is effectively stopped dead.

2) As such, RAID 0 is absolute [censored] lunacy. Look closely at the other RAID models. Also look closely at the specification of the controller - does that little PERC controller cache the data that is unwritten to disc in event of a power failure?

3) I would suggest some of the midrange HP boxes - DL385 type specification (sorry, I only think in rackmount units!)

4) Think about multiple PSUs as well as RAID

5) UPS?

6) Backup?

7) Stoarge capacity. There's an awful lot of storage-heavy applications there, and if you really want to give them longevity it may be worth considering a seperate storage box, so you can just add more capacity without painful migration.

8) Ask the supplier about the lifetime of the server, how long parts are available for after the model is end of life, etc.

9) Buy the best onsite warranty you can afford - next business day as an absolute minimum.

10) You sure you want to run all that on one box? It might be more expensive, but it will remove the risk of running the whole business on one server. *Then* you can look at cheaper boxes.

This may be a charity, they may feel that budget is tight, but it is never the hardware purchase that is the expensive part of an IT lifecycle. Implementation, maintenance and support will almost always work out more.

I do appreciate your price problem. You might want to have a look on eBay. There's usually quite a few IBM xSeries there at reasonable prices. You'll have to take out a separate maintenance contract with IBM if you follow this route. (Even if you don't want to go with a support contract you'll find that IBM servers are built to a very high standard - a bit like Honda motorcyles.)

A possible alternative would be to buy a couple of cheap no-name servers and run them as a cluster. That way you'll get the good uptime with (possibly) less reliable equipment. A bit like the way RAID works for disks.

Even if you do it at home it's bordering on the insane. I would only run RAID 0 if I/O performance was absolutely critical and the server was part of a cluster. It's enough of a risk to run important stuff on a single disk, but to double (or triple or whatever if you use more than two disks) your chance of a disk failure just doesn't make sense.

Absolutely agree...even my home PC is running RAID1!

Ok, you don't mention how many users this is for and whether you really need SBS Premium as ISA and SQL are not often neccessary, circumstances dependent.

However if this for a relatively sensible number of users (say up to 30 or so), may I suggest you take a look at this:

Hp ML110 G5 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140153

The box has space for four SATA drives and is extremely well built for the money. It has on-board raid (its a bit poo, but functional at the price point) and you can sling the enclosed 250gig disk out and put 2 x 500's or larger in for 100 quid (ish). Up it to 4gig memory and you are laughing. We shift perhaps two of these a week, and while we have had one failed PSU, it was more or less DOA and failed while it was being built. Ebuyer sent another and haven't even collected the fautly one yet.

Gig sticks of memory are 20 quid (well that is what we pay for crucial, perhaps a little more to you) and disks are two a penny. It comes with 3yrs ndb on site too, which is a good selling point.

The only things I would consider are:

OOB management card - 100 quid(ish) and possibly a separate raid card (2 channel 3ware or something - about 60 quid) - The on board raid is pig slow at mirroring, but that is really all you can expect at the price. Having said that in a quick rip of the data or power cable from the back of the disks it has never failed to correctly determine the working and out of sync disk when re-mirroring and really might just do for the money.

If you've lots of users, make sure you buy decent 7200rpm disks, with good cache on board.

Hope that helps.