Need help building a server?

[Clockwerk]

I work for a publishing company, if I wanted to build a machine that could hold all of the software we support, basically images of the discs so I could do away with the "library". In addition to would require network access to at least 3+ techs, possibly the whole building. What kind of OS and hardware would be sufficient? Ive built plenty of home systems and HTPC setups, but no servers or "work environment" systems. I'm looking at about 1300+ Titles ranging from BOB software to independent programs all in various sizes.

 

[KingGheedora]

I'm confused, are you asking about building a file server to store images of software?

 

[JackMDS]

Given your knowledge as reflected from your post I would suggest that you would seek professional consult before you start.

As oppose to self built gaming rig that might result in losing in an online game, work related server can when not done right can damage the business.

 

[Tristor]

If you could be more specific about your size requirements, that would be most helpful. It sounds like you are probably looking at a situation where a small SAN would be most beneficial though, as opposed to a single fileserver. With a SAN, you have the ability to set it up for high availability and redundancy and add extra storage to it at any time to increase capacity (if you archive images for instance). Your best bet for something like that is to go through one of the larger OEMs and see what sort of pricing you can get based on your needs. I'd suggest talking to Dell and HP, as they both offer fairly decent pricing on SANs.

 

[Kakumba]

Another vote for SAN. Remember, you can make the LUNs viewable to multiple servers, so if you lose a server, you can mount the LUN on your DR server, no downtime. SANs are great, highly recommended.

 

[KingGheedora]

Kakumba, what is a "DR server"?

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: KingGheedora
Kakumba, what is a "DR server"?

Disaster Recovery Server.

 

[Kakumba]

Indeed, Disaster Recovery is what I was getting at.

While we are explaining terms, a real quick overview to make sure everyone understands SAN. SAN is a Storage Area Network, basically imagine a whole lot (easily up to 45 disks), in a massive RAID array, with a server controlling them. Once thats all set up, you use the SAN administration tools to create LUNS (Logical UNits), which are unformatted "chunks" of disk, which you present to the server(s) of your choice, and then it is up to the admin of that server to mount and format the "chunk" appropriately. In this way, you can buy a big SAN (one off cost), and provide high speed, highly available disk to many servers, while being able to use the same disk on multiple servers (ie, one server uses that piece of disk, but your backup server can also see it, to back it up).

I thought about this some more, and depending on what you need, you could mount the LUNs read-only on say 3 geographically separated servers (once all the data is on there), and then unless you lose the SAN/ network, you are sweet. That may be overkill, but hey. Hope that helps.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Given your knowledge as reflected from your post I would suggest that you would seek professional consult before you start.

As oppose to self built gaming rig that might result in losing in an online game, work related server can when not done right can damage the business.

QFT and not in a disrespectful manner - if this machine goes down it will be your a$$, so i would personally outsource this and get a "real" server that has a warranty and on site tech support - don't think you will do it with $1300 though, your employer needs to understand to have 24/7/7365 costs a bit of $$$$

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Clockwerk
I work for a publishing company, if I wanted to build a machine that could hold all of the software we support, basically images of the discs so I could do away with the "library". In addition to would require network access to at least 3+ techs, possibly the whole building. What kind of OS and hardware would be sufficient? Ive built plenty of home systems and HTPC setups, but no servers or "work environment" systems. I'm looking at about 1300+ Titles ranging from BOB software to independent programs all in various sizes.

In reading this I get the impression you have no budget and no or not a lot of money for the acquisition of a server.

Is there a big jump from 3 techs to "the whole building"? Is "the whole building" 5 people, 50 people, 500 people, or 5000?

So far, from what I've read, if you have a good backup methodology (ie a tape backup device), a basic XP desktop with a few locked down shares in it, and a 500GB (or however large) hard drive, and you put it all in a safe environment no one else can go into (physically), you'll be fine. Oh, you can buy an SC440 from Dell for $500, and all that, but for 3 people, with a few hundred gigs of data, any machine made in the past 5 years can easily handle that and much, much more.

The important bit is to get a tape backup and a tape schedule for your data, or get the server folks to run an agent on it so they can back it up every night.

Perhaps you could tell us more about what you want to do and I could give you better suggestions? For example - start it off simple - are you on a domain? Do you have agents running on servers for nightly backups you could piggyback off of?