Selecting a new server

[DonMgt]

We are planning to upgrade our company server. Could anyone point me to any white papers or sites I can use to make a better evaluation of the servers being recommended to me? We are an engineering company with a total of 70 people, 10 of these are mechanical engineers work are large 3D files up to 25 megabytes. Most of the rest of the staff doing relatively standard MS Office manipulation and we have a few databases. Deciding how much total space we want is relatively easy. Less obvious are the decisions such as number of disks, same disk speed for all users, type of processor, number of cores, amount of RAM, RAM speed, etc..

Thanks

 

[wuzy]

We are looking at upgrading our server for our 50 person office. Currently we have a hodgepodge of servers giving us about 2 terabytes without any RAID. Our technical guys would like to totally replace the existing servers which given their age and wide variety of components doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Our network is almost 1 GBS now and we will finish those upgrades within the month. We will be moving from Windows XP to 64 bit Windows 7 over the next 18 months.

Performance goals: A lot more speed for the large engineering files (5-25 megs), want it a little quicker for everyone else. I’d like most data appear most files less than 5 megs immediately. Even 5-25 meg files I'd like to load a a few seconds.

Space goals: At least 1 TB of really fast space for the engineers, 1 TB of pretty fast space for general work, and 4 TB of space for reference material that doesn’t get edited (archived correspondence, pictures, videos, archived PowerPoint files, scanned drawings, etc.). To make the initial budget we will sacrifice on the initial space so long as we can easily add new disks into the system.

Growth: Reference material increases 2-3 times as fast as the other data. Would like to have potential of several terabytes of data space for each group for the next 5 years.

Security: At least RAID 1 for our work product, possibly RAID 5. Not sure if it makes sense to do anything other than daily backups on the reference data.

Budget: Goal of around $10K for the initial spend. Ok if it takes more than that to really get to the disk space we need so long as we can do it incrementally. I think I’d rather sacrifice initial disk capacity to get more speed, long term capacity and security initially.

Initial concept: Dell T610 server with an X5550 quad core processor, 6 or 12 GB ECC RAM, with a PowerVault MD1000. Mix of 15,000 (for the large engineering files and our databases) and 7,500 RPM drives for general work. We’d keep our reference data on our legacy system until we grow the new system large enough to bring that data on line. If I understand the scalability right, we can add another processor to the T610 server and eventually add a second server to the system if our speed needs dictate this. This is more server CPU power and RAM than my IT guys initially came up with (and of course more money). It looks to me we can use the PowerVault to bring all the growth space we would need.

Does our basic plan make sense? Is there a way to quantify the benefits of RAID 5 over RAID 1? What are other people doing with the ever increasing “reference” data from a network standpoint? Are there any rules of thumbs to use in deciding how many people to average per disk? So for example, 6 engineers doing UG/NX, I can put them on 1 600 GB, 2 300 GB, 3 or 4 146 GB 15,000 RPM drives, same issue with 25 people doing spreadsheets, email, project scheduling, word processing. Disk choices 7500 RPM sizes would allow us to have 25, 12, 6 or even less people per disk.

Thanks

Just a copy and paste of your original thread in the storage forum, assuming it still applies here.
I'll get back to replying when I find time.

 

[mathmo]

might help if you start by saying what server you have currently.... and what problems you are facing with it, hence WHY you want to upgrade

would make it a lot clearer in what to recommend

edit: oh crap, I totally didn't notice the repost.... for some weird reason I thought he was just quoting the original post in this thread. I really shouldn't be posting at after 5am in the morning....

 

[DonMgt]

We've actually made our decision and just installed the upgraded server. We put in:

Main Server:
Dell, Dual Xeon CPUs, 16GB RAM
1 TB usable hard disk space in RAID 10

Network Attached Storage:
5 TB usable hard disk space in RAID 5

Both systems can have more disks added quite easily, so we've met our goal of a system that is easily expandable, has the initial space we wanted and in our budget.