[geeks] Server Suggestions...

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Mark Benson wrote:
> 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 believe with that budget, you could get an eight-core IBM System 
x3400.  I use these machines and can recommend them wholeheartedly.

Peace...  Sridhar