Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

hello,
i'm going to university (either czech republic or japan) and we have agreed with my friends and high school classmates that we will stay in touch and build a server for data sharing. Mainly movies, music and knowledge base.
While on high school we utilized my server with ~1tb storage. I personally would invite upgrade from p4 2.66ghz i have now. Therefore I'm planning to buy some brand server and pack it with 4 to 8 hdd's to get at least 2tb of redundant storage, 1RU if possible. it will be placed to some colocation centre...

so far a have had a quick loot at sun:
sun fire x4140 x4150 x4200 m2

however, these servers looks quite pricey to me.
so i had look at ibm direction
ibm
x3250 m2
x3650 express link

i think the opteron vs xeon doesn't matter much nowadays, mainly as i'm not going to push the cpu to its limits.
i would like to know what do you think of dell, because i personally don't like them much (i have several bad experience)
i'm also open to other brand servers. so if you have any good experience...

what would you advise me to go for?

toxygen wrote: I personally would invite upgrade from p4 2.66ghz i have now.

Entry level ?

( Looks over sadly at little blue O2 running the office ... )

Entry level for me was a Compaq Proliant 1600 with five 9.1Gb hard drives and two 500Mhz PIII processors.

http://www.ironsystems.com/products.asp

pentium wrote: Entry level for me was a Compaq Proliant 1600 with five 9.1Gb hard drives and two 500Mhz PIII processors.

a least smp

VenomousPinecone wrote: http://www.ironsystems.com/products.asp

thanks, will check

pentium wrote: Entry level for me was a Compaq Proliant 1600 with five 9.1Gb hard drives and two 500Mhz PIII processors.

Yeah, the same here... though it's a pair of 600's in a workgroup server.

The main fileserver is a pair of 1GHz P-III's... SMP + fileserver + 66-MHz 64-bit PCI + 2GB RAM = good thing.

Having said that, lots of last-gen server gear kicking around cheap these days. Should be able to find a dual-*insert something fast*-server rig quite easily.

what would you advise me to go for?

Fast disk subsystem, plenty of memory and a good server-quality network interface. Offload as much off of the CPU as possible. For pushing data out over a network link any of the dual-processor/dual-core systems will work just fine (within reason, a NCR 4x80486/33 won't cut it), you just want to make sure that the CPU has to mess with the data as little as possible.

SAQ wrote: a NCR 4x80486/33

damn, that sounds evil.

what's your budget?

obviously you're looking at SATA. Seagate's announced 1.5Tb sata drives. in a standard 1U you can get 4 1-1.5Tb drives, so with 3 drives plus one spare you with raid 3,4, or 5 you can get about 2Tb, without the hotspare you can get 3TB-4.5TB redundant.

$225 - http://www.supermicro.com/products/chas ... T-300C.cfm
4x$250 - 1TB hdd
$115 - AM2 uATX w/1GB ram, X2 3800+
$1340 plus a 1U AM 2 HSF

the HP DL320 's an option
it would shake out to about $2,150, 1-5 year hw warrenty would be extra, and you'd have to find sleds for the 3rd party drives.

I dunno what the ebay market is on 1Us with 4 SATA bays.

depending on what internet package you get, that dual 33MHz 486 may be overkill (assuming it's got a pci slot)

Damn Thats High End, not entry level. My Entry Level Server is a Gateway 6400 with dual 1GHz P3 with only 256MB Ram and a 9GB & 18GB HDDs.

What Operating System are you planing to run on it?

Gray Fox wrote: Damn Thats High End, not entry level. My Entry Level Server is a Gateway 6400 with dual 1GHz P3 with only 256MB Ram and a 9GB & 18GB HDDs.

High end for a home user.

VenomousPinecone wrote:

Gray Fox wrote: Damn Thats High End, not entry level. My Entry Level Server is a Gateway 6400 with dual 1GHz P3 with only 256MB Ram and a 9GB & 18GB HDDs.

High end for a home user.

I can do better. But I got it for $50 back in January.

HP servers are the current "bread and butter" of any IT operations these days.
DL320, DL360 etc. are nice machines.
There are models that can take a lot of disks in the server box if you dont want to run an external storage cabinet.
For Raid controller I can recomend HPs P400 or P800, fast and reliable.
All this of cource comes with HPs great installations tools and server start.
Get a machine that has ILO (Iintegrated Lights Out) that will allow you to remote control the mahine over IP even if it is turned off.
You can turn it on, reset it, go in to BIOS, isntall OS etc. with ILO.
The above suggested machines comes with ILO.

Seems a bit expensive for me though, to buy new enterprice class machines for the proposed aplication.
Why dont you just keep the current P3 computer and add a few 1TB SATA drives, run software mirroring and your done ?
Add a cheep IP KVM so you can manage the box in to BIOS, reinstall OS and software in case of server crash.
Belkin, Avoccent etc has a few inexpensive boxes.

Gray Fox wrote: What Operating System are you planing to run on it?

basically any unix-like system as long as it is free. from linux(debian, centos) to bsd-likes, even solaris

to others: thanks for suggestions. i have been rather busy recent days, but i will have a look at it in few weeks. thanks to you all!