Office File Server Build (Specs Suggestions) Please

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BoomerX01

Limp Gawd
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Jul 1, 2002
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Hey guys,

I am looking into building an office server for backup and storage. The server will have between 3-5 users data on it, I was thinking of full copies of their drives, or at least profile/critical documents my guess is less than 10GB easily per person at most.

I also would like another form of backup, like an external drive or something, basically something that can be taken offsite for security reasons/copy reasons.

My question is: What kind of system should I be building specs wise? A dual PC system, with some sort of RAID plus tape drive? Thanks guys!! Any reccomendations are appreciated.
 
BoomerX01 said:
Hey guys,

I am looking into building an office server for backup and storage. The server will have between 3-5 users data on it, I was thinking of full copies of their drives, or at least profile/critical documents my guess is less than 10GB easily per person at most.

I also would like another form of backup, like an external drive or something, basically something that can be taken offsite for security reasons/copy reasons.

My question is: What kind of system should I be building specs wise? A dual PC system, with some sort of RAID plus tape drive? Thanks guys!! Any reccomendations are appreciated.
Click to expand...

For just 3-5 users, you really don't need anything special. An old p2 would handle it just fine. However, if you're planning on storing critical files, then you NEED to make sure that your butt is well-covered with backups. The last thing you want is 3-5 angry people coming to you demanding to know why all of their critical data is lost!

For that reason, I'd use RAID (even software-based) on the machine itself to help it survive the loss of a drive(*), and at least another system to back it up to.

(*) Even if uptime isn't critical, a lost drive in a non-RAID environment will still result in a loss of data - and data is almost always worth more than your time and the cost of hardware combined.

steve
 
I was thinking of having a RAID setup, and an external USB2.0 drive that is a complete copy of one drive that can be taken off-site as well.

Any software suggestions for backups?
 
RAID 5 is your friend....one drive fails, just plug in a new one and it rebuilds :p
 
i would suggest getting a dell poweredge 420sc for around $400
 
or a 1600SC if you want upgradability, $500 for a dual xeon capable machine?
 
I think a big part of your equation, which has been left out your initial post, would be how much money you've got to spend on this project.

I guess there are two ways to look at the project, the ideal way, and the budget way.

I'm going to assume you're talking about a Windows environment here, and as a result for familiarity's sake you may want a Windows based fileserver. I may be totally off base here, but it's how I'm proceeding.

Like others have said, processor speed isn't much of an issue. I'd recommend anything over 1.5ghz really, just for upgradability's sake, assuming you're likely to grow. If you're building everything new, a nice cheap AthlonXP oughta do it, maybe a 2100 or 2700 or so, either of which can be had for under $100, and inexpensive motherboards are available for between $40 and $80. A decent amount of RAM would be nice, to allow future upgrades, so we'll say 512m of the value variety, which oughta be no more than $80-90. Also, if your motherboard did not come with it, pick up a gigabit capable network card. You might not use it now, but it'll help in the future if you ever do get to. Also, having two NICs is good for redundancy's sake.

Hard drives are your key, and since you're looking for reliability, I'd go no farther than Seagate's newer drives. Why? Well, not necessarily because they're more reliable than any other brand, but all of their retail drives ship with 5 year warranties, so even if they do go out, you won't have to fork over an arm and a leg to get them replaced. And lets face it, going under 80gb is not going to save you much money, and in reality, the price difference between an 80 and a 120 is only ~$20, so take your pick.

Now, here is where my IDEAL and my budget really separate. Choice of operating system. Technically what I would do with a fileserver is possible with either Win2k/2k3 server OR WinXP Pro, but with XP Pro it's a hack, and with 2k/2k3 server it is officially supported.

2k and 2k3 server support RAID5 in software, which is something that XP can do, but you have to manually modify some files (for a link, see tomshardware's article on it here: http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041119/index.html )

Now, you can't boot off of a RAID5 array in 2k/2k3 or XP, so my setup would be this. You'll need three drives, so 3 60s, 3 80s, 3 120s, whatever you bought.

First, install the os on one of the drives, and during the install procedure, only create an 8gb partition on the drive to put the OS. 8gb should be more than enough for the OS and swapfile, as well as any basic applications you need.

Once the OS is installed, use the disk management utility to convert all three drives to dynamic drives. This will leave you with 1 drive that has an 8gb simple volume on it, and 2 blank drives.

After that, use disk management to create disk mirrors of your C volume (system) on both the remaining drives. Thus, you'll have a three-way redundant OS installation, and 2k/2k3/XP can all boot from a RAID1 array. If you used 80gb drives, you'll have 72gb free on each drive, if you used 120s you'll have 112, and so on.

Once the mirror is setup on all three drives, use the remaining disk space on each drive to create a RAID5 volume. Don't use up all the space (if you had 72gb free, use 71gb and leave 1gb unallocated). That is to take into account that if you replace the drive, the one you get back might have minor differences in available space, and you wouldn't want your array to not fit, would you? Since you'll be doing RAID5 on the remaining drives, you should have a total available capacity of 142gb if you used 80gbs, 222gb if you used 120s.

So that gives you dual redundancy on your OS volume, and a single redunancy on your data drive, resulting in more available space and better drive performance.

You can do all of what I said above on XP, but like I said, you have to modify some OS files to make it happen. And one of the benefits of doing the software based RAID over the hardware is that you can take the drives out of this system and put them into another 2k/2k3 system and they will be recognized, as opposed ot with a hardware RAID5 controller where the array would need to be rebuilt.

That's a lot more wordy than I had initially intended, and it may be way beyond your needs. As for off-system backup, a firewire/USB2 based external hard drive would be neat, definately. Or, for even more redundancy, assuming you have the budget you could put together a stripped down (single hard drive) version of your first server, and make network backups to it. A decent utility for both disk backups and network backups is SyncBack, and best of all, it's free. I've used it before myself, and it's pretty topnotch, especially for being total freeware. Here's a link! http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/

Anyways, let me know about your more specific needs, and I'll try to rewrite some more customized suggestions for you, hopefully in a less wordy way :)
 
Amazing post sinisterDei. Very appreciated.

My situation right now has changed a bit since my first post. With money being a bit tight, we are holding off on this server for probably 3-6 weeks I would guess. The budget for this system would be less than $1,000, not including OS/Software.

This server will be accessed via VPN; but by no more than 3-5 users, and I doubt at the same time.

I was personally leaning to a low end P4 system, say maybe a 2.4C or something of that nature since the price difference is so low, but with your suggestions of a AMD system, that would put the total price of the system much lower and allow for more hard drives, which like you said is the bread and butter.

I had one question about that RAID 5 setup; if I have 3 120gb drives, how much space will there be for storage total?

Thanks guys, great posts!
 
BoomerX01 said:
Amazing post sinisterDei. Very appreciated.

My situation right now has changed a bit since my first post. With money being a bit tight, we are holding off on this server for probably 3-6 weeks I would guess. The budget for this system would be less than $1,000, not including OS/Software.

This server will be accessed via VPN; but by no more than 3-5 users, and I doubt at the same time.

I was personally leaning to a low end P4 system, say maybe a 2.4C or something of that nature since the price difference is so low, but with your suggestions of a AMD system, that would put the total price of the system much lower and allow for more hard drives, which like you said is the bread and butter.

I had one question about that RAID 5 setup; if I have 3 120gb drives, how much space will there be for storage total?

Thanks guys, great posts!
Click to expand...
A low end P4 with hyperthreading wouldn't hurt. HT is nice for servers, it's almost like free DP.
RAID 5 with 3 120GB drives would give you 240GB of redundant space - plenty. I like the Highpoint RocketRAID 454 as an inexpensive, better-than-winxp-raid-5 solution. there's also an SATA version of that controller, if you're using SATA drives.
 
If I was gonna build this, here is what it would be:
$100 Athlon XP 2700+ (retail)
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=19-103-342&DEPA=0
$60 Mobo Asus KT600 based
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-131-486&depa=1
$72 512m Mushkin
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=20-146-219&DEPA=0
$37 Radeon 7000 (have to have AGP4x to work in 8x slot)
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-125-117&depa=0
$25 Trend Gigabit NIC
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=33-156-139&depa=0
$285 3x Seagate 120gb 7200rpm 8mb
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-148-022&depa=0
$45 3x Cold-swap HDD enclosures
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-121-115&depa=1
$70 NEC 16x DL-capable DVD+/-R
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=27-152-029&depa=0
$77 Antec Mid-tower case
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=11-129-148&DEPA=1
$47 (optional) Replacement/Spare PS
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=17-103-604&depa=1
$91 (optional) Highpoint 454 RR
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-115-016&depa=1
$9 (optional, required if you get the highpoint) FDD
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=21-152-005&depa=1
$9 Keyboard
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=23-131-114&DEPA=1
$10 Mouse
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=26-129-004&depa=1

That brings your total to $937, assuming you pick up the highpoint and FDD. I you leave em off, lop off $100. Also, the extra Power Supply isn't really necessary, just nice to have around, so there's an extra $50 off if things are tight. And last but not least, the removable hard drive trays are not necessary, but they will sure make things nice if a HDD dies. Not technically needed, so knock $45 off the price if you feel like it.

That brings us down to a possible low price of approx $742, assuming my math is correct. All prices include shipping, I might add. Processor has a 3 year AMD warranty, mobo has 3 year (I *think*) ASUS warranty, HDD has 5 year warranty. RAM is probably lifetime, though I didn't check.

And having those specs, in addition to being able to be a fileserver, it would be fully capable of running a light-load database+webserver, or an FTP server for remote file access. Lots of stuff really.

As for the advantages of HT, while they are great on paper, in practice I have yet to see HT make a big difference. But with a fileserver, it shouldn't matter one way or another.

And you say the server will be accessed by VPN, does that mean that the fileserver will be remote to its users (as in not on the same LAN together)? If so, you might just consider one of the consumer-level routers that can handle VPN support. If they're on the same LAN, VPN access shouldn't be necessary.

As for the hard drive size issue, RAID5 gives you an available total capacity of (Total Capacity of All drives)-(Capacity of one drive). So in 3x120gb, you subtract 120 from 360 and you get 240 available. RAID5 is not limited to 3 drives, so available capacity (and % lost due to redundancy) gets better with each drive, while still maintaining single-drive fault tolerance.
 
How big are the drives in the users machines?

If they're over 30gb or larger you could just back them up on one another.

I mean we're only talking about 3-5 users here.
When the time comes to upgrade from that you will probably be able to spend more and get more bang for your buck.

Cheers.
 
Not too long ago, I built a couple of machines for the office. One is a PDC (primary domain controller), a file server that handles NT domain logons, roaming profiles, etc.. (Of course, it runs Samba under Linux.) It got a dual P3/866 motherboard that I had sitting around, and 5x200 gig drives in RAID 5, for about .8 TB of usable storage. Now, for something to back it up to...

I had another dual P3/866 board sitting around (these were taken out of servers because they were just too slow to waste rack space on), and I put 8x300 gig drives on it in another RAID array. Once per night, rsync backs up the PDC and another machine to the backup server. Then, a gzipped tar ball is made of the backup, so we have point-in-time snapshots going back for some time. Great idea, but there was one problem: The 866 MHz CPUs just didn't have the sheer horsepower to compress hundreds of gigs of data every night - it took longer than a day to compress one day's backup. So, that was replaced with an Athlon64 3000+, and now a full compression only takes a few hours.

Because of various factors (one of which is the ability to spread interrupts around), the dual-CPU machine is *much* more responsive under load than the single-proc, despite the fact the dual-CPU machine has significantly less processing power. That fits the file-server role just fine, and the low responsiveness under load of the backup server is just fine - nothing else ever runs on it.

steve
 
Just be aware that with a RAID 1 or 5 setup, when a user or virus screws up the data, it is screwed up on ALL the copies.

So I like to use 3 drives... 2 in a RAID 1, and the 3rd I use for images or file copies. I like this better than RAID 5. If any drive fails, you've got a copy on the other two. If some bonehead or virus erases all of their stuff (or worse: theirs and others, too) on the RAID array, you've got images (or file copies) on another disk. I wouldn't even share the 3rd drive.

As for what you should use, everyone has already basically stated that you don't need much CPU power... If you've got some older hardware laying around, put it to work! Maybe take the oldest desktop in the office, upgrade it, and use it's old stuff for this file server.

One other point... I don't know what kind of internet connection you're dealing with, but if you've only got $1K budget for your server, I'm guessing they don't have a T3. ;) Probably 128-384K upload, but I'm hypothesizing there... So your performance over a VPN is quite likely going to be limited by the upstream of the internet connection and not the system speed.

With the budget you've listed and the VPN likely being a huge limitation, I recommend you throw out any thoughts of dual processors.
 
Scarceas said:
Just be aware that with a RAID 1 or 5 setup, when a user or virus screws up the data, it is screwed up on ALL the copies.

So I like to use 3 drives... 2 in a RAID 1, and the 3rd I use for images or file copies. I like this better than RAID 5. If any drive fails, you've got a copy on the other two. If some bonehead or virus erases all of their stuff (or worse: theirs and others, too) on the RAID array, you've got images (or file copies) on another disk. I wouldn't even share the 3rd drive.
Click to expand...

thanks for mentioning this. RAID is not a replacement for backups. The problem with having a third drive in the FS is that if your server fries, that drive might as well go with it. Get a Tape backup, or use a couple of DVD once per week to make OFF SITE backups. HDDs are not intended to be moved around a lot, and therefore not a good 'removable backup medium'.
 
drizzt81 said:
...The problem with having a third drive in the FS is that if your server fries, that drive might as well go with it.... HDDs are not intended to be moved around a lot, and therefore not a good 'removable backup medium'.
Click to expand...

Let me start with where I disagree, and that's the 2nd point I've quoted here... I trust data on a hard drive more than ANY other medium. Tape? Puh-lease!

Hard drives are in fact VERY durable. Part of their engineering design is to sustain high impact forces, when powered on and off. I saw pictures a hard drive torture device Quantum was using to test drives in this regard. It was large, and basically just slapped a hard drive silly. Pretty cool. Anyway, when the heads are parked most modern drives can withstand 200 times the force of gravity, and though I'd never test it, Maxtor for instance lists the "operating mechanical shock" for the diamondmax plus 9 series at 60 g's (non-operating is listed at a whopping 300 G's)..

Think about it... When the the disk is off, the heads are parked and at all times the platters are *sealed* in a strong metal case. Heat would be my only concern for a drive installed in an external enclosure of some type, removed from the system... Maxtor lists the same drive from the above paragraph as being able to withstand 71C (~160F) degrees when not operating.

I checked a Western Digital WD2500BB, and it can withstand nonoperational shock of 250 G and non-operational temperatures of 65C (149F) degrees.

I would imagine then, a hard drive can withstand forces that would crack, shatter, or otherwise damage a tape cartridge. If you heat a tape up to 160F, I don't think it will fare too well, either.

The only advantage I see to tape is that if you have absolutely HUGE amounts of data, it becomes cheaper per GB. But with harddrives almost routinely selling at $0.50 per GB, often times $0.35 (on black Friday Best Buy sold a drive for just $0.1875 per GB), you really have to be dealing with a lot of data before tape makes a noticeable monetary benefit.

Furthermore, I think there is a huge performance gap with tape compared to a hard disk.

Basically I think people recommend tape because it used to be a good idea and it's just stuck around for that reason. If you look at the durability of today's hard drives, the low cost, and the high performance, there is little reason to recommend tape.

I think CDs are inferior as a backup medium as well. They scratch easily, can't withstand heat either, can be broken, and have relatively poor capacity and speed.

However, you're right about having the drive physically in the file server. The solution, IMO, is to make your backup hard drive removeable. There are different ways to accomplish this, but I've found great effectiveness and low cost with firewire. I've used "regular" external firewire enclosures, but in a server I have used and really like Granite Digital's stuff:
http://www.granitedigital.com/
I set one up for fairly cheap with a couple of 120GB drives and their removeable firewire tray. Take one drive home every week, swapping it out with the another. The tray is rather convenient, so you could have 2 like I did, or 5 of them (one for every weekday), or whatever pattern you like.

It seems to me that SATA was designed to be hot-swappable, though I am not 100% sure. I just notice when looking at the connectors that their design looks hot-swappable. Anyway, I read that the Asus A8N-SLI motherboard apparently comes with a card that provides an *external* SATA connector.... While this may not be the motherboard of choice for *this* intended configuration (so perhaps I'm rambling off topic), it would be a nice feature to see more widely adopted, since it creates a method for an easy-access, hot-swappable hard drive backup.
 
I work as the IT person at a small software development company. I was asked to build a large fileserver on the cheap with backup as you describe.

These specs may be a bit out of date but the principle should still apply:

Mobo: Tyan Dual Slot-1 P3 Mobo with onboard SCSI & 6 SDRAM slots. Onboard video & Intel 10/100 ethernet. (I would rebuild with gigabit ethernet capable mobo)
RAM: 512MB PC133
CPU: 2x P3 650mhz
Case: 4U Rackmount with 8 5.25" external bays and 1 3.5" external bay.
Power supply: Redundant 350W hotswap. PC Power & Cooling brand I think.

Controller: Promise Supertrak SX6000 (6 IDE Raid ports)

Drives: 2x40GB Seagate 7200rpm in Raid 1 (mirrored) for system.
4x 60GB Seagate 7200rpm in Raid 5 (180GB useable space). (I did say this was a few year old...5 years to be exact.) All drives in hotswap cages w/ active cooling.

Our system also has a DVD-rom and CD-RW for burning items. If I were to rebuild I would buy a DVD-RW instead.

Backup: 2 160GB drives in External case w/ USB 2.0 & Firewire hookups. Swapped once a week, backed up every day. One drive is always offsite except during swap.
We also have a tape drive (DLT-1) that gets a monthly backup of the system as well and the tapes are taken offsite as well (my house).

If I were to rebuild today:

Mobo: Probably the ASUS A7N8X-VM w/ mid range Socket-A processor (2000+ - 2500+ range) or some other mobo with most everything onboard (saves space and money).
Ram: 512MB PC3200
Same Case: (the 4U rackmount we have just rocks) (link: http://www.servercase.com/miva/miva..._Code=SC&Product_Code=CK481&Category_Code=4UA )

Controller: I would probably switch up to SATA Raid. Using 3Ware's cards most likely.
Drives: I like Seagate. never had a drive fail on me. I would probably use 4 160 or 200GB drives in Raid 5. (backup at that point becomes more of a problem though)

I would add on a good gigabit NIC & switch as well.
 
Scarceas said:
I set one up for fairly cheap with a couple of 120GB drives and their removeable firewire tray. Take one drive home every week, swapping it out with the another. The tray is rather convenient, so you could have 2 like I did, or 5 of them (one for every weekday), or whatever pattern you like.
Click to expand...

Actually the main advantage of tape has to do with getting proper backup procedures

For example, for work we are required by law to keep our backups for 7 years. (financial data of a charity, we also keep hardcopy, but it is easier to work with data in electronic form) So what I do for backups is I have: 2 weeks worth of daily backups, (just to get back files people accidentally erase) 5 weeks worth of Friday backups, 1 year worth of Monthly backups, and permanent quarterly backups. Also the daily tapes are taken off site every night, and returned a week later, and two of the friday tapes are off site at all times. (in case of fire or similar we can at least get those back)

This means I need 8+5+12+4 = 29 tapes, and have to replace 4 of them every year. Much easier to do with tapes than hard drives. And the tapes are warrantieed to keep their data for 30 years. (AIT and DLT tapes)

==>Lazn
 
Lazn_Work said:
And the tapes are warrantieed to keep their data for 30 years. (AIT and DLT tapes)==>Lazn
Click to expand...

Warranties are pretty meaningless. Unless they're going to cover the *actual* costs of data loss (in your case, reconstructing data, facing financial audits, etc.), then they do you absolutely no good. You'll probably find that the actual renumeration to you if the data is lost is completely, utterly insignificant compared to what it will actually cost you. Companies don't generate warranty or guarantee periods based on whether data will actually be lost, but based on a comparison of how much they'll pay for warranties vs. how many purchases they think they will get by advertising a longer warranty period.


steve
 
NerveGas said:
Warranties are pretty meaningless. Unless they're going to cover the *actual* costs of data loss (in your case, reconstructing data, facing financial audits, etc.), then they do you absolutely no good. You'll probably find that the actual renumeration to you if the data is lost is completely, utterly insignificant compared to what it will actually cost you. Companies don't generate warranty or guarantee periods based on whether data will actually be lost, but based on a comparison of how much they'll pay for warranties vs. how many purchases they think they will get by advertising a longer warranty period.


steve
Click to expand...

Actually they do, up to $150,000 (it was an optional data warrantee purchase)

But the thing is that with that many tapes and with them all having the same data, I should have a good copy of it on at least one of them. (I actually have yet to have a tape go bad)

==>Lazn
 
Scarceas said:
However, you're right about having the drive physically in the file server. The solution, IMO, is to make your backup hard drive removeable. There are different ways to accomplish this, but I've found great effectiveness and low cost with firewire. I've used "regular" external firewire enclosures, but in a server I have used and really like Granite Digital's stuff:
http://www.granitedigital.com/
I set one up for fairly cheap with a couple of 120GB drives and their removeable firewire tray. Take one drive home every week, swapping it out with the another. The tray is rather convenient, so you could have 2 like I did, or 5 of them (one for every weekday), or whatever pattern you like.

It seems to me that SATA was designed to be hot-swappable, though I am not 100% sure. I just notice when looking at the connectors that their design looks hot-swappable. Anyway, I read that the Asus A8N-SLI motherboard apparently comes with a card that provides an *external* SATA connector.... While this may not be the motherboard of choice for *this* intended configuration (so perhaps I'm rambling off topic), it would be a nice feature to see more widely adopted, since it creates a method for an easy-access, hot-swappable hard drive backup.
Click to expand...

So we are leaning towards a Raid 5 solution with 3 drives, at least 120gb a piece, which will provide the best redundancy and performance.

The VPN access is limited by 384kbps upstream from TimeWarner, so that will limit any performance of the actual hardware.

I am leaning towards swappable drives, or at least one external firewire HD device that can be taken off site for backup purposes.
 
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