New company server - need help!

[Batou]

Hi all,
need some advice about the new company server we're going to purchase.
The server will be used to manage the internal corporate domain, user accounts, shared documents and folders for 20-30 users.
Our budget is 3.700€ - 4.500€. We will be buying parts from Italy.
The preference goes to intel for the CPU, but anything for the MB and the other parts. The system will run at default speed.
We've just received 2 quotation, unfortunately, even if i know enough about normal PCs hardware, i don't know pretty anything about servers, so i really need someone to help us out.
I'll show you now the 2 quotation we got, but i think many information are missing, so i wait your advices to know which other informations you need me to add.

----------- 1st quotation -------------

PROLIANT ML – € 4.780,00 + VAT
number of supported CPU: 2
number of installed CPU: 1
CPU brand: Intel Xeon E5-2620 - 2,10 GHz - v2 Hexa core - 15MB cache
Interconnection QuickPath: 7,20 GT/s
Chipset: Intel C600
Standard memory: 16 GB - DDR3L-1600/PC3-12800
Memory tecnology: DDR3 SDRAM
Memory slot: 24
Secure Digital (SD)
HDD : N° 5 HDD 500GB
Controller: Serial ATA/300 6Gb/s SAS
RAID support: yes
RAID levels: 0, 1, 1+0, 5, 5+0, 6, 6+0
Total number of expansion slots: 11
External 5.25" bay: 3
Internal 2.5" bay: 8
Slot PCI Express x8: 5
Slot PCI Express x16: 4
Graphic controller: Matrox G200
Gigabit Ethernet
Dispositivi input
USB ports: 10
Network (RJ-45): Yes
Remote Management: Yes
PSU: dual redundant
Max Wattage: 460 W
Microsoft windows server 2008

Intallation and configuration excluded


--------------2nd quotation------------------

SERVER PRIMERGY TX 140 S2 – € 3.700,00 + VAT
number of supported CPU: 1
number of installed CPU: 1
CPU brand: Intel Xeon E3-1220V3 Quad core 8 MB cache - 3,10/3,50 GHz -
Direct media: 5 GT/s
Chipset: Intel C224
Standard memory: 16 GB
Max memory: 32 GB
Memory slot: 4
HDD : 4x300 gb sata
RAID : yes
RAID levels: 0, 1, 1+0 + 5 CONTROLLER RAID
PSU: dual redundant
External bay: 3
Expansion slots: 4
PCI Express x4: 1
PCI Express x8: 3
Graphic memory capacity: 256 MB
Ethernet: Gigabit Ethernet
USB ports: 10 (USB 2.0: 6 / USB 3.0: 4)
Network (RJ-45): Yes
VGA: Sì
Remote Management: Yes
Software Microsoft windows 2008 R2 – 5 cal incluse

Intallation and configuration excluded

 

[mvbighead]

Give your listed uses, I wouldn't be too concerned with much other than level of support and disk space/type.

HP I would suspect would have a better support offering than Primergy, but being from the US I can't be sure the same is true in Italy.

The only trouble I see in the above quotes is that I am going to assume the HP is using SATA disks. It's probably fine for 20-30 users, but SAS is much preferred to straight up sata.

It sounds like this will more or less be a DC and file server. For that, requirements won't be too high. I'd be inclined to look for lesser servers than those listed above if you're certain that it is only going to do those few things.

If you were to really go crazy with it, you could get Server 2008R2 Enterprise and run HyperV and create a DC and a File server separately. A really nice thing about running virtual servers is the ability to migrate them to new hardware quickly and easily to keep running production systems on supported hardware. That may not be something you're inclined to do, but would be something to think about.

 

[Batou]

Thanks for your advices mvbighead, unfortunately i'm enough noob about servers, can't understand what DC and HyperV are, sry about that. It just seems really weird to me spending 3k-4k € for a server with 4-5 HDD and not even a single SSD, to say the true it seems a crazy price! I hope to be wrong about that.

 

[saratoga172]

How much storage space will you be using? Sounds like the second option fits the bill pretty well.

Alternatively you could look for some 10k SAS drives on the server. You'll also want to make sure it's setup in a raid 1 or raid 5. You'll lose some space but get performance and some redundancy in case of a drive failure.

Don't think a 10k drive setup is necessary but may be beneficial in the future.

Ssd's for servers are way more expensive.

 

[mfenn]

The Primergy is a Fujitsu server, so it's a real server with real support. I would be fine using it. Given that this machine will just be a domain controller (DC) and file server, the CPU and RAM are more than sufficient.

What's a little concerning is the disk setup. Can you tell us a little more about how the file server will used? Just profiles? Some other data?

 

[DaveSimmons]

The HP disk storage seems like an odd choice - 5 x 0.5 TB RAID 5 = 2 GB usable space. Why not just RAID 1 mirror 2 x 2 TB drives instead for that little space?

The Primergy makes more sense - 9 GB usable in RAID-5.

Both should be fine for file serving. SSDs don't make sense on a budget for file servers since platter drives are more than fast enough to keep up with normal file request loads.

Many years ago we had a 10-person office with a Pentium single-core 133 MHz file server, using old IDE 66 drives. It got the job done.

 

[debian0001]

How many Domain Controllers are you going to run?

Best practices is to have at least 2 DCs running and I would highly recommend running a file server on a separate server in case it gets infected.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd378865(v=ws.10).aspx