[geeks] Server Suggestions...

[Mark Benson]

I'm looking into purchasing a server to replace our venerable Dell
Poweredge 1800 (it's not that old but it is very low spec and struggling
with the load). The current machine is about 5 years old. I don't trust
the hard disks past then at the very least. It's a single 3.0 Xeon HT
with a whole gig of RAM. It's running SBS2003 and I hate it. I do all my
dev on Open Source, and Windows Sever has a lot of crap we just don't
need on it (Exchange and IIS being 2 fine examples). In order to upgrade
and 

I require the following features:

A minimum of 4 cores and 4GB of RAM
No OS (I intend to use BSD or Linux)
Redundant PSU
SATA drives (not SAS, our budget won't cover it)
RAID-1 (or equivalent storage redundancy)
Tower chassis or something I don't need a rack for (vertically oriented
is better)

The server currently is used for:

File Sharing to Windows boxen
MySQL 4 (may upgrade to 5)
PHP 5.2.x
Apache 2.x
Ruby on Rails (which is hell in Windows)

It serves to 8-10 clients and the CPU power is mostly required for heavy
database lifting. The RAM requirement is to allow plenty of headroom,
and RAM is cheap so I may as well grab it while it's there. I thought 1
GB was loads in 2004 and it turned out to be wholy too little.

I am asking because there are a lot of people on here that know a lot
more about this than I do and this time I'm determined to get the right
box for the job.

Budget is 2000 GBP.

I also need advice on a backup system that will tolerate dust. DAT72
doesn't, I doubt LTO will either. I am currently using an external hard
drive but that's not ideal. It's a tricky one. We don't really have
anywhere that's totally dust free. The server lives inthe cleanest room
in the building and although it's not choked the server (it's quite
clean inside actually) it's killing DAT72 tapes or drives (I think? I
don't know for sure) in spite of me running the cleaning tape once a
week.

That has a separate 500 GBP budget (restrictive I know, but we are only
small).

Any advice is very welcome.


-- 
Mark Benson
http://markbenson.org/blog