Cheap server recommendations!!

[thop]

Not in my local pc shop, but there are more than enough distributors who sell them. Also i don't have to pay double the price for ram that comes in a fancy packaging when i want to do an upgrade ...

[Paddy]

Id buid it myself... you would save a hell of a lot of cash. Perhaps it would finance an upgrade for yourself too?

[Fat Tone]

Originally posted by Paddy [MU]
Id buid it myself... you would save a hell of a lot of cash. Perhaps it would finance an upgrade for yourself too?

All well and good if he's in a position to provide the appropriate level of support!

[Paddy]

Yeah I know... I was just thinking with my stomach

[GNEP]

Originally posted by agallag
Depends who your reseller is. Ours is quite large, so they keep stock of pretty much every compaq product. We get our servers within a week most times, even with non-standard configs. Quicker than our dell desktops even.

I think my company deals directly with Compaq, globally... (we're rather large). And I really do suspect the problems are in our IT division.

[Ovi]

Wow!! Thanks for the quick replies guys!

Agallag: Okay, so that Dell's going out the window!! I too have heard good things about Compaq's servers, and the ProLiant ML310 sure looks tempting!! I'll check it out.

Thop, ex RedRed: I would love to build the server myself, but as Tony Andrews has mentioned, I must be in a position to provide support, which I'm unfortunately not in, with my college studies taking up all of my time!!
Another problem in assembling the rig myself is the availability of suitable components. Brand pushing is common here, and it's generally difficult to get a motherboard of one's choice, esp for servers. Add to that other components like a server tower case with redundant power supplies etc which are even more difficult to get. The market seems to be geared more towards desktop PCs! So the server would have to be a branded one!

Dilitante1: I was also thinking about going the SCSI way. How would an IDE RAID config compare against it? And would a single SCSI HDD suffice or would 2 be required in a RAID config?

Another thing: The company in its efforts to keep costs to a minimum, is considering a P4 1.7 GHz processor. Would that be sufficient? Actually, even though my aunt is the CEO, the owner of the company is going to have the final say in this matter, who I wish could understand the critical nature of this purchase! (and not be cheap!!)

Thanks for the suggestions guys!! Keep em coming!!

Cheers
Ovi

[Fat Tone]

Ovi

Scare him with a top-of-the-line price, so he'll settle for an ok price which isn't bottom of the range. A common tactic A bit like the 'softening up' so many governments try.

T.

[Ovi]

Tony: Apparently the owner knows some computer dealer, who gave her the 1.7 GHz processor idea! So I guess she can't be fooled on the price front!! BUT, my aunt sort of warned her that if she doesn't follow our recommendations, and goes the cheap way, she won't be responsible if the new system doesn't perform (properly!)!!

Cheers
Ovi

[Topha]

Tell the owner its better to spend a few bucks more now than buy a new server again, soon.

But its usually hard to convince people of such things

[thop]

Those few bucks that the owner saves now will come back one day and haunt him! He will end up paying triple for every penny he tried to save. But i know the situation you're in, these people are hard to convinve.

[breezer]

I have been using Dell servers now for 5 years and have not had any downtime on them yet, 7 are netware servers, 2 nt.
The range is from p2-450 to 2 *2.8 zeon. Their servers are very cheap in the uk at the moment.

Q.
-Is this system mission critical, if so going for the cheapest may not be the best in the long run.
-If a software company is involved in developing the db, this would surely be the most expensive part of the setup.
A company that can't or won't transfer legacy/historic data is not someone I would deal with. Alarm bells would be ringing in my head concerning the competance of the developer, ie. will their structure be able to deal with a large dataset because they don't seem to want the starting database populated.
Complications will start to set in when the boss wants a report of the last 5 year of sales with a projectin for the future, I would not want to be the guy who has to get data from foxpro and mssql.

-Just how complex is the database, does it have to be ms app server based why not mysql, postgres php/perl.

Finally (and most critically) if a relation of mine asked this question and they were the ceo, I would probably decline to answer because I would value their friendship and I would not want to jepardise this by making comment/judgment/recommendation on a situation I do not fully comprehend.

Breezer

[Taz]

Ovi do you have any idea what their budget is?

I wouldn't have thought the cost difference between a 1.7Ghz P4 and >2Ghz P4 would be that great so it makes sense to spend the extra. Memory is relatively cheap these days too so 1Gb might be a better option.

I've never been a fan of software RAID so I would recommend a hardware controller and either mirror or RAID 5 the drives. For performance SCSI is the way to go using either 10k or 15k drives.

The way to sell it is to ask how much money the company will loose for every hour the servers down for then compare that to the cost of buying a decent, fault tolerant server

[Ovi]

Okay, I've got some more details:
-- The company that's developing the DB is charging about US $4000+, and the budget for the server is around US$2000 - 2500(including the OS and SQL server 2000)
-- The database is reasonably mission critical, as all work will revolve around it.
-- The old database is based on FoxPro ver2.5 for DOS!! Now that is OLD!! But still, data should definitely be retrievable!!
I agree with Breezer on this one.......the firm developing the DB stated that it's not possible to move the old data to the new DB, which definitely hints at their incompetence. If they didn't want to migrate the old data, they could have have said plainly that they wouldn't do it as part of the deal (or charged extra for doing it), but saying that it's technically not possible....well.....

Breezer: I'm not really playing an active role in this server thingy, but my aunt knows that the owner has no knowledge of the technicalities involved in this and thus might go for the cheapest deal.........thus she asked for my suggestions, so that the new system works as intended. In any case, my suggestions to her are going to be on the safer side, rather than the cheaper one!

But as everyone agrees here, the most difficult part here is convincing the right people!!

Cheers
Ovi

[Taz]

Looking at the pricing on Compaq's website the lowest spec server to do the job would be ~$2500 and that doesn't include a tape drive

Compaq Proliant ML310
2.53Ghz P4 Processor
1Gb ECC RAM
2 x 36Gb 10k drives (Mirrored)
RAID LC2 controller
Gigabit Ethernet NIC

[Taz]

Originally posted by Ovi
...the budget for the server is around US$2000 - 2500(including the OS and SQL server 2000)Ovi

The software alone is going to cost around that