What kind of hardware would you suggest for a server?

[loki99]

Hi all!

I am about to buy a server for the office of an online shop. It will be needed as a file server, it will run some php programms and it will host the mysql databases (costumers and merchants). Since this is a startup company, the resources are quite limited so it should cost <1000 €.

What would you guys recommend to buy?

* cpu

* motherboard

* how much ram

* harddisks

* raid or not

* anything I should be aware of in regards of upgradability?

Thanks in advance,
loki99

[nevynxxx]

From what you say you want it for, I would say CPU will be pretty irrelevant, go with something nice and cheep.

Motherboard....don't even think about it, buy from someone like HP or Dell (or Sun but your price point precludes that I think)

Memory - As much as you can afford, specify this last.....

Hard drives - SCSI, 15krpm, and raid them, in either 0 or 0+1 or 5. If this is holding important data you really should only consider one of the last 2, you don't want a hard drive to fail and loose data.

You don't mention weather you will rack mount or not. I would recomend doing, it makes life much nicer, but at the same time adds expense.

Definitly by a tape drive or similar for backup!!!! cds are not fun.

YMMV this is just my opinian as an IT/Systems Manager
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[loki99]

Thanks for your reply.

Is it really necessary to use scsi drives or would a sata suffice. And since speed won't be much of an issue, I thought of setting up a raid 1.

Haven't thought about a rack yet. what would be the advantages of using one?

[nevynxxx]

It's not really neccessary, but I would advise you look at the MTBF for the SATA drives and for the SCSI drives.

SCSI is not more expensive because it is quicker (or rather was quicker) it is more expensive because it generally uses better quality components.

Also a 15krpm drive will have much lower seek times, a very good thing for the applications you want.

RAID 1 is good, if you decide you do need the speed, 0+1 is also very good.

A rack makes life much nicer if/when you expand. Switches can be rackmounted and you have a nice neat tidy system, without trailing wires for people to fall over. Also most decent rack mount cases are made to give very easy access for any maintainence that might be needed.

In short, I would say SCSI is a must, the rack probably isn't.
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[loki99]

Thanks for your kind recommendations!

I went with a dell server, celeronD 2.5ghz, 1gig ram and two 10krpm 146GB scsi disks. We couldn't afford a tapedrive at the moment (the server already costs 1500€!), but are planning to buy one as soon as possible. But since this is a startup, we don't have too much data yet anyhow!

[olger901]

If you are gonna run a MySQL database and a few PHP scripts you won't need much.
My server is an:

Powermax 300 Watt PSU
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7N8X-X
Canyon Geforce MX4 440
Infineon 1024 Meg Ram DDR400 CL2.5
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250Gb 7200rpm 8Meg Cache
Asus DVD-ROM
Lite-On DVD-/+RW

Runs: Apache2, PHP5.0.5, MySQL5.0.x, Perl, mod_perl, inetd and various other services, without a hitch and has like 100 visitors a day

Though nowadays I'd reccomend:

Motherboard: Asus A8N-E ($95)
Processor: AMD Athlon X2 3800+ (Dual Core, can give huge benefits in speed) ($349)
Ram: 2Gb of Ram (Brand to your preference, though I would go for CL2 or CL2.5) ($200)
Videocard: Doesn't matter much (as cheap as possible) ($50)
Harddrive: Western Digital RaptorX drive (SATA, 150Gb, 10k rpm, 16Meg Cache) ($300)
DVD-Drive: Any el cheapo DVD-Rom will do

Next to that, a Tape drive is useless, time consuming and expensive for backups if you'd ask me, what I use for backups is a 250Gb Network HD on a 1Gbps network.