[YLUG] Server purchase

[Matthew Bloch]

Hi Richard, my £0.02 --

Yes SCSI is avoidable :)  I'd recommend 3ware SATA controllers.  These have a 
solid hardware RAID implementation with an open-source driver and solid (and 
closed source) control tool.  I think we pay <£200 for a 4-port 9550 
controller.  We also favour Supermicro barebones chassis for being solidly 
built, well-cooled and reliable.  Put in the memory / processor etc. that you 
need (e.g. 4x74GB WD 10,000RPM Raptor drives would give you a bit over 140GB 
in a super-fast and super-cheap RAID10 configuration, or 200Gb in a RAID5) 
and you won't go far wrong -- we use www.tmc-uk.com for supplying both 
Supermicro and 3ware kit.

Re: "branded" versus "unbranded" debate, while I'm sure Dell/HP are reliable 
we never saw the premium as being worth it, and smaller server manufacturers 
in this country just didn't do a good enough job for us.  Supermicro get the 
"hard stuff" right (chassis design, cooling and motherboard) without making 
you pay too much of a premium for a fully-built server.  You just buy the 
base and plug in your own memory, drives & CPU ... very little to go wrong!

We have 10s of these particular servers which average hundreds of days of 
uptime between upgrades.

Personally if you only *think* you might need a cluster setup, you probably 
don't as you can introduce a million new failure cases if you're not 
careful :-)  I would just budget for a permanent stock of spare bits for one 
decent server, and buy quality parts: power supply, fans, drives etc. which 
are the most likely things to fail.

-- 
Matthew Bloch                             Bytemark Hosting
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