Buying Advice - 200 Person File/Account Server

[aumgn]

I need to put together a computer to be used initially as a file server for a small high school. There will be about 200 users total. I would like to give each user about 1gb of space each.

Eventually, as the school expands it's computer lab, I would like to be able to have each user be able to log into their account on any computer in the lab with their own desktop, settings, etc.

The number of simultaneous users will likely top out around 60 at the absolute max. The computer will also need to run two very small, simple, databases available to all users on the network.

I'm looking for rough guidelines in terms of what it needs for CPU and RAM, and whether or not it will require anything fancy in terms of storage like SAS drives and/or RAID.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks.

 

[mfenn]

So basically you want an Active Directory domain controller and fileserver?

Given that it's at a small high school, I'd imagine that the network will be more of a bottleneck than anything else. That'll stop your users from really stressing the file shares at all.

Since this is going to be a production machine, I recommend that you buy a server from a Tier 1 vendor like Dell or HP. For example, a Dell PowerEdge T310 with a Xeon X3430, 8GB of RAM, PERC H200, and two 500GB 7.2K drives will run you about $2K before discounts.

 

[mvbighead]

First of all, I'll second what mfenn said.

Second, we need a budget. Depending on how high or low you're looking budget wise, you can get some good redundant hardware that will stay on pretty much 99.9% of the time. You start looking at assembling yourself, and you may want to figure in some extra down time, as any hardware problem will result in immediate downtime.

 

[aumgn]

They had a quote put together for them that was $17,000. It was for a Dell PowerEdge T710 with 6x600GB 15k SAS drives and 24GB of RAM. The computer itself was configured at around $9000 with another $8000 of unnecessary hardware and software... good internal redundancy, but no external or offsite backup. With a "basic hardware replacement warranty" which I don't know the details of, but no time-specific onsite replacement, etc.

I'd like to come in cheaper than that. This isn't a mission critical server and the school would be upgrading from Google Docs, so most things would be better than what they have now.

The entire school is wired for 10Gbps ethernet.

When I'm getting into the Active Directory area, is Active Directory taxing the server all the time or only during login/logout? I'm getting mixed answers.

 

[mfenn]

Somehow I doubt the school has 10Gig everywhere. If it's a new installation, they may have Cat6 in the walls, but if they really have enough money to buy 10GbE switches for each port, then they are loaded and the $17000 solution they were quoted would be fine.

Don't knock Dell's "basic hardware replacement warranty", it's quite good. 9x5 NBD onsite for not very much money. You can of course upgrade to 24x7 4hr if it's mission-critical, but you said it isn't.

Anyway, assuming the school has more reasonable 1GbE, then the bottleneck will still be the network, unless you LAG a bunch of 1GbE links (not a bad idea actually, assuming your switch supports it).

I'd say the T310 is more than sufficient for the current needs, but you know how these things grow over time. You know the local budget environment better than us, so it will be your call if it is easier to make a single big purchase every 4 years or multiple smaller purchases every year.

Since there does seem to be a decent budget, I'd look into getting something slightly beefier than the T310, but not the $9000 machine you originally specced. Then make it a Hyper-V server so that you can virtualize the domain controller and fileserver. That way, if the load from either becomes too great, you can easily migrate the VM to another physical box.

Regarding AD load, it basically occurs whenever the user does an operation that requires talking to the directory server. That is, you'll see the highest load in the morning/class change when a bunch of people are logging in, but otherwise the load should be pretty low. For reference, we have a domain controller running on an old P4-based Xeons that serves about 50 users or so. There are rarely complaints of slowness.