Okay, 10 person server, what do I need?

C

Citizen86

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Feb 20, 2007
Messages
4,572
So I'm looking at building a server for our small business here. We do a lot of work on the computer, basically we have all our Quickbooks files saved, lot's of files like Excel spreadsheets, logo's, text files, everything. Also, I do the graphics work for labels (we're an import company), so I'm working off larger Illustrator and Photoshop files from the server.

Right now we're using a regular desktop computer as the "server". It's actually the secretary's computer, basically a 500 gig hard drive with 2 gigs of RAM and a E6300 I believe.

So I was planning on building a server, buying a Q6600 with 4 gigs of RAM and a RAID 0+1 array of 74gig Raptors, but now we're taking a look at Dell servers. If we put something like a Xeon X3353, 2.66Ghz and 4-8 gigs of RAM, what would be a nice hard drive setup to compliment this? We have about 6 people working off the server right now, doing their daily things, could get up to 8 or 9 people in the future. Right now also all our files only take up 12.7 gigs, but that will surely get larger as I make more and more labels.

So I'm a little confused as to which RAID array would work well under our circumstances, whether we should get 10k or 15k SCSI hard drives, etc. I've been given around a ~3k budget, but I'm also buying this in Mexico so it will most likely be more expensive than the American version.

So.... thanks for reading. Any inputs and suggestions please.
 
I don't think you need all that power.

A dual-core and 4GB of ram and a couple of 500GBs will do you fine.
That's unless you want to splurge.
 
Well we have the ability to splurge ;)

I've never used any other hard drive other than my desktop hard drives, I have a 500gb 7200.10 seagate at home, and that's fast when I bought it compared to my older 7200.7 hard drives.

So with this many people connecting at the same time, would those 10k-15k hard drives basically be a waste?
 
Citizen86 said:
Well we have the ability to splurge ;)

So with this many people connecting at the same time, would those 10k-15k hard drives basically be a waste?
Click to expand...

What will it be serving my? MySQL db's, streaming video, hi-def, etc. You could stand to gain from 10k drives if its a heavy load.
 
Mostly office work, Quickbooks, excel spreadsheets, and I'll be doing larger Illustrator and Photoshop files off the server, but no streaming video or anything like that.
 
If all you are going to be doing is filesharing, then the CPU and RAM is almost a mute point as almost any modern cpu (even single core) and 2GB ram will be suffice.

Buying a nice fast set of harddrives like SCSI isnt going to be too great, if the rest of your network infastructure is 100Mbit, perhaps you need to spend some of the budget here

What are the goals of the server? Just file space?
How are the other computers setup, how is your network configured?
Does the budget include a backup system? RAID is not backup.

If all your doing is file sharing then i would probably just buy a cheap DELL server and have it configured so that both the OS and data drives were mirrored (RAID1) and that there was some kind of tape backup (if there isnt already).
 
Well we've been wireless for a couple months, but right now we have someone working on getting us all wired in through 100mbit.

As far as a tape backup, is tape basically the standard in backup? We're not really thinking about backing up to an area outside of the office, since our internet connection is rather poor (2mbit shared for everyone). You can't get much better in this area :mad:

Is tape the regular solution, or what about say 2 external hard drives, which would be swapped between being the backup on the server and being put in a safe. So every day or every other day they are swapped then if there is a fire/theft/earthquake/bombing or whatever might happen, we have a backup of everything on a hard drive in the safe. Would that work logically?
 
I think we're going to buy 3 of these. The new 320gb platter's are supposed to be really fast. We'll put 2 in RAID 1 and keep an extra as a spare in case it goes down. Unless Raid5 would be better?
 
I'd get 3 of the 680 GBs and do what you were planning (2x in RAID1, the third as a hot spare).

Gives you more space, with maximum security.

For something like this I'd definitely go for RAID1 over anything else: you could do well having a full backup with a hot spare in case something happens.

As for tape backup, it's gradually being replaced by HDD backup as the standard. I'd stick to HDsince HDDs are easier to recover fromDs, especially as a small business.
 
I agree. I would go with the 640gb drives too, but they are nowhere to be found south of the border.... so that's why I'm thinking perhaps RAID5, although it seems like it's going to be difficult to find a RAID5 controller as well.....
 
If the secretary's computer is doing a good job, buy her a new one and let hers be the server.
 
Citizen86 said:
I agree. I would go with the 640gb drives too, but they are nowhere to be found south of the border.... so that's why I'm thinking perhaps RAID5, although it seems like it's going to be difficult to find a RAID5 controller as well.....
Click to expand...

You could always get 4 of the drives and do RAID10; it can be done by most motherboard chipsets nowadays.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top