I was just posing some hypothetical questions to dig for more information and see what others thought. 
Hows the S3 virge support for the various *nixes, XP, Free BSD and the ilk? Are the drivers open source etc?
Pretty much all of the "golden oldies", such as the S3 Trio and Virge cards, along with old ATi's are very well supported under both the BSD's and Linux.
OK it is abvious that none of you really know what you are talking about. First things first, if you really need a server, BUY ONE - don't build the support offered is almost necessary unless you are un expert at everything. Second, what the hell is the server for. If it is a webserver, who cares about disk space, three 9GB SCSI drives should be fine. But if it is a file server at least three 72GB SCSI drives will be needed - or just go the SAN box route with a multiple TB capability.
As far as SCSI vs. IDE. You would be an idiot to run IDE in a major server environment. When accessing hundreds of thousands of files per hour they could not keep up. IDE is making inroads in the SAM world with support in devices such as the MaxAttach box and the such. However SCSI is still king. Also RAID 5 is the MINIMUM you should ever run on a server. This requires at least three identical disks and a RAID controller. It is not unstable and it gives you a hell of a lot of redundancy.
About processors and performance. The key to a good server (if it is busy) is RAM for caching hits. 2GB is good for 200 users and 4GB is even more respectable. Anything more will require a terribly expensive setup that you won't be abkle to build. As far as processing power is concerned, itis not terribly important. My servers are 700MHz PIIIs and they run both mail and file storage for over 200 people. The key to a server is stability and not speed - in terms of file serving a 700MHz processor is about as good as a 1.2GHz processor anyways, it is a very menial task.
Lastly about OSs. Windows is by far the most popular platform, and as such has lots of support and software. UNIX is shrinking and LINUX is growing slightly - for certain things. There is still Novell out there with a good stable OS. If you have money, get MS, if you are broke, go LINUX. Lastly also budget about $2000 to $10000 for a tape backup or a tape robot system - you will need it, plus the $100 per disk. Like I said, if you are asking these questions go to a dealer like IBM, Compaq, or Dell. No sane techie would ever build their own server.
As far as SCSI vs. IDE. You would be an idiot to run IDE in a major server environment. When accessing hundreds of thousands of files per hour they could not keep up. IDE is making inroads in the SAM world with support in devices such as the MaxAttach box and the such. However SCSI is still king. Also RAID 5 is the MINIMUM you should ever run on a server. This requires at least three identical disks and a RAID controller. It is not unstable and it gives you a hell of a lot of redundancy.
About processors and performance. The key to a good server (if it is busy) is RAM for caching hits. 2GB is good for 200 users and 4GB is even more respectable. Anything more will require a terribly expensive setup that you won't be abkle to build. As far as processing power is concerned, itis not terribly important. My servers are 700MHz PIIIs and they run both mail and file storage for over 200 people. The key to a server is stability and not speed - in terms of file serving a 700MHz processor is about as good as a 1.2GHz processor anyways, it is a very menial task.
Lastly about OSs. Windows is by far the most popular platform, and as such has lots of support and software. UNIX is shrinking and LINUX is growing slightly - for certain things. There is still Novell out there with a good stable OS. If you have money, get MS, if you are broke, go LINUX. Lastly also budget about $2000 to $10000 for a tape backup or a tape robot system - you will need it, plus the $100 per disk. Like I said, if you are asking these questions go to a dealer like IBM, Compaq, or Dell. No sane techie would ever build their own server.
Not a bad explanation for a newbie! But you missed the part where I said I run a small business and am looking to start constructing servers of my own to add to the product lineup, and that it would be sacrelige to just outsource the hardware to Compaq.
But you missed the part where I said I run a small business and am looking to start constructing servers of my own to add to the product lineup, and that it would be sacrelige to just outsource the hardware to Compaq.I'd be very interested in knowing why you feel it's a good idea to insult everyone else the first thing you do in your post, especially when the first suggestion you give after the insult is one that's been given several times by the people you just insulted.
Care to explain?
He said that?... Damn, he did! I was too tired when I read his post and just skimmed over it... :disgust: I sure as hell know what I'm talking about, as do you and most everyone else in this thread.
irwincur, you can take that attitude over to Off Topic, or better yet, just off our entire community.
A little harsh perhaps, I just don't like it when people act like biatches for no good reason, that right is reserved for BSD elitists only, and maybe Solaris elitists
Heh. Well I don't mind it too much either, except when it comes from some guy with 4 posts to his name.
Not one, not two, but three! Three is the magic number; it is the one that comes after two, but before four!
irwincur is right on the money here.
I think his statement that 'nobody knows what they're talking about' refers to posts like this:
Why not? A TNT2 M64 will cost about the same. Why limit yourself to a 2MB video card? That's rediculous.
and
Waste? Am I taking the memory out of the hands of starving children in Africa? I can buy a new/retail TNT2 M64 for $30. Why get a used 2MB card that will cost just as much? Besides, the liklihood of getting a "random BSOD" while working at the desktop are virtually nil.
Bahahahaaha!! Its a server, boy!
The older vid cards are amongst the best for a server farm because they're proven, they use one or two watts of energy (ever felt how warm a TNT2 M64 gets?) Did someone mention the Rage XL or 128? They're commonly used as onboard vid cards on mid end servers these days...
My sister has a S3 Virge PCI video card! It's on her Pentium Pro 200mhz system with 64 mb of RAM on a Asus TX97 motherboard! It also has a 16x Goldstar CD-ROM! It won't even accept a PS/2 keyboard.
Yes, the fault of the Virge PCI card... hmmm If only the Virge had 32Mb onboard, it would cure all of the worlds server bandwidth, redundancy and storage problems...
I'm another that has firmly ingrained belief that only the uneducated will build their own server for mission critical applications. Take this for example, can you walk into your local computer dealer and pick up a new Adaptec 2100S RAID controller card as a loan while the one that's powering your RAID array in your server that you built is away getting repaired under warranty should it ever fail.... hahahaha right....
This is where 4 hour onsite warranty turnaround support really shines (Gotta love Compaq for that!). If your server dies, it will be working again in four hours, guaranteed. For smaller to mid sized businesses that dont have sufficient funding for server redundancy and/or dont need much processing power from servers (load balanced backup servers for example) then you just cannot beat paying that extra money for the 3 or 5 year onsite support. You will see that the additional amount of money for the four hour support is not that great because the products are excellent to begin with.
People have already summarised the main reasons to stick with the big guys for enterprise server applications, another is SOE (Standard Operating Environment) - This is a whole new box of worms too, but to grossly summarise, if all machines are identical then support costs are dramatically reduced. Lets say you have 200 machines that are 'white box' products from your local computer shop and lets say you have another 200 machines that are corporate workstations such as HP Vectra's or Compaq Deskpro's or Dell Optiplex's etc etc. And you buy a 3 year warranty for both.
In the three years, odds are about 10% of the machines will have hardware failures, possibly more. By sticking with the big guys, should the motherboard or NIC or video card or whatever fail, you will get an identical motherboard/NIC/vid card etc. This means you dont have to recreate a new image for it. Who's to say, in 2 years from now, if you have 20 of your 'white box' systems fail that you'll get 20 new motherboards that are identical to the one supplied with it originally? VERY unlikely, support costs dramatically increase, you require a fair bit more server space for storing Ghost images of each old machine with one different hardware component etc etc etc...
Look at the big picture, the home computing world is VERY different to the corporate world.
I think his statement that 'nobody knows what they're talking about' refers to posts like this:
Why not? A TNT2 M64 will cost about the same. Why limit yourself to a 2MB video card? That's rediculous.
and
Waste? Am I taking the memory out of the hands of starving children in Africa? I can buy a new/retail TNT2 M64 for $30. Why get a used 2MB card that will cost just as much? Besides, the liklihood of getting a "random BSOD" while working at the desktop are virtually nil.
Bahahahaaha!! Its a server, boy!
The older vid cards are amongst the best for a server farm because they're proven, they use one or two watts of energy (ever felt how warm a TNT2 M64 gets?) Did someone mention the Rage XL or 128? They're commonly used as onboard vid cards on mid end servers these days...
My sister has a S3 Virge PCI video card! It's on her Pentium Pro 200mhz system with 64 mb of RAM on a Asus TX97 motherboard! It also has a 16x Goldstar CD-ROM! It won't even accept a PS/2 keyboard.
Yes, the fault of the Virge PCI card... hmmm If only the Virge had 32Mb onboard, it would cure all of the worlds server bandwidth, redundancy and storage problems...
I'm another that has firmly ingrained belief that only the uneducated will build their own server for mission critical applications. Take this for example, can you walk into your local computer dealer and pick up a new Adaptec 2100S RAID controller card as a loan while the one that's powering your RAID array in your server that you built is away getting repaired under warranty should it ever fail.... hahahaha right....
This is where 4 hour onsite warranty turnaround support really shines (Gotta love Compaq for that!). If your server dies, it will be working again in four hours, guaranteed. For smaller to mid sized businesses that dont have sufficient funding for server redundancy and/or dont need much processing power from servers (load balanced backup servers for example) then you just cannot beat paying that extra money for the 3 or 5 year onsite support. You will see that the additional amount of money for the four hour support is not that great because the products are excellent to begin with.
People have already summarised the main reasons to stick with the big guys for enterprise server applications, another is SOE (Standard Operating Environment) - This is a whole new box of worms too, but to grossly summarise, if all machines are identical then support costs are dramatically reduced. Lets say you have 200 machines that are 'white box' products from your local computer shop and lets say you have another 200 machines that are corporate workstations such as HP Vectra's or Compaq Deskpro's or Dell Optiplex's etc etc. And you buy a 3 year warranty for both.
In the three years, odds are about 10% of the machines will have hardware failures, possibly more. By sticking with the big guys, should the motherboard or NIC or video card or whatever fail, you will get an identical motherboard/NIC/vid card etc. This means you dont have to recreate a new image for it. Who's to say, in 2 years from now, if you have 20 of your 'white box' systems fail that you'll get 20 new motherboards that are identical to the one supplied with it originally? VERY unlikely, support costs dramatically increase, you require a fair bit more server space for storing Ghost images of each old machine with one different hardware component etc etc etc...
Look at the big picture, the home computing world is VERY different to the corporate world.
Bozz, I understand your point, and Im 100% sure people like Nothinman understands them as well, known brands such as Compaq is he way to go for serious applications, noone has ever disputed that.
Now, firstly, irwincur's statement, wether he(she?) likes it or not, insults everyone who has posted in this thread by the way it's written, and I doubt it's cause of improper use of the English language, heck English isn't my first language, and still i know enough of it to make myself somewhat clear, and to make sure I don't insult people I dont mean to insult.
And secondly, an unfortunate, but very real truth, is that the one thing that above all dominates decisions about what's purchased is, budget.
Anyone who has any experience in the business world knows this.
In some cases bulding your own may very well be the only choice that's left, in which case you may very well be left with a TNT2 as your best option, like it or not.
Im not saying neither you nor irwincur are wrong, I agree mostly with what you say, but face it, reality is tougher than just buying what you'd like to get.
If it was up to me, we'd get a bunch of SunFire 3800 boxes or better at work, but we can't afford it, so we're moving to Compaq/Linux, and if we couldn't afford that, I'd probabaly be tasked with bulding a bunch of boxes myself, and running RedHat on those, I wouldn't like it, but that's reality, and I can either put up with that, or I can quit.
Now, it seems to me like most of us here agree on one thing, good brand boxes such as Compaq's are the best way to go, BUT, that's not always a possibility, and hence we have to adopt to the environment at hand, a concept that some people seem to have a problem grasping.
Sorry about the rant, can't help myself sometimes.
Oh and if there are lots of missing spaces and such in this port, I blame that on my parrents crappy keyboard, Im wathcing the house for them this weekend
Now, firstly, irwincur's statement, wether he(she?) likes it or not, insults everyone who has posted in this thread by the way it's written, and I doubt it's cause of improper use of the English language, heck English isn't my first language, and still i know enough of it to make myself somewhat clear, and to make sure I don't insult people I dont mean to insult.
And secondly, an unfortunate, but very real truth, is that the one thing that above all dominates decisions about what's purchased is, budget.
Anyone who has any experience in the business world knows this.
In some cases bulding your own may very well be the only choice that's left, in which case you may very well be left with a TNT2 as your best option, like it or not.
Im not saying neither you nor irwincur are wrong, I agree mostly with what you say, but face it, reality is tougher than just buying what you'd like to get.
If it was up to me, we'd get a bunch of SunFire 3800 boxes or better at work, but we can't afford it, so we're moving to Compaq/Linux, and if we couldn't afford that, I'd probabaly be tasked with bulding a bunch of boxes myself, and running RedHat on those, I wouldn't like it, but that's reality, and I can either put up with that, or I can quit.
Now, it seems to me like most of us here agree on one thing, good brand boxes such as Compaq's are the best way to go, BUT, that's not always a possibility, and hence we have to adopt to the environment at hand, a concept that some people seem to have a problem grasping.
Sorry about the rant, can't help myself sometimes.
Oh and if there are lots of missing spaces and such in this port, I blame that on my parrents crappy keyboard, Im wathcing the house for them this weekend
Sunner, I understand what you are trying to say, but consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the entire corporation/business, not just the computer equiment itself. Any intelligent network administrator will push the fact the TCO will be considerably lower in almost all small-mid sized businesses if they use either the 24 hour or 4 hour warranty.
Remember, should a server go down, almost ALL productivity will stop in many enterprises. Is the total cost of ownership more by having a server down for a day or two at a time? A few thousand dollars over 3 years pales into mere insignificance to possible lost productivity due to excessive downtime.
In some enterprise environments, staff can do other work while a network is down. In most, they cannot.
If a couple of days downtime is not going to harm the business (ie they usually have less than 10 employee's and the machines dont have strict domain and security configurations), then by all means, a cheaper server is probably as good a choice as any mid range x86 powered big name box. So long as you are aware of the long term risks and discuss this with the people you are implementing the network for.
Many issues such as this are what discerns a good systems administrator to an exceptional one. Personal views of a company/corporation must never influence your decision, you might hate Intel and love AMD (as I do) but you must respect the fact that you are employed to do the best by your employer, not some obsession you have with a certain company/provider etc. If you do your job well, you have stronger job security and your pay goes up
Remember, should a server go down, almost ALL productivity will stop in many enterprises. Is the total cost of ownership more by having a server down for a day or two at a time? A few thousand dollars over 3 years pales into mere insignificance to possible lost productivity due to excessive downtime.
In some enterprise environments, staff can do other work while a network is down. In most, they cannot.
If a couple of days downtime is not going to harm the business (ie they usually have less than 10 employee's and the machines dont have strict domain and security configurations), then by all means, a cheaper server is probably as good a choice as any mid range x86 powered big name box. So long as you are aware of the long term risks and discuss this with the people you are implementing the network for.
Many issues such as this are what discerns a good systems administrator to an exceptional one. Personal views of a company/corporation must never influence your decision, you might hate Intel and love AMD (as I do
) but you must respect the fact that you are employed to do the best by your employer, not some obsession you have with a certain company/provider etc. If you do your job well, you have stronger job security and your pay goes up All of you that have said to go with a server from a large company I have to agree with you.
The only thing is he is wanting to be compaq. Well sorta.
All I can say is don't. Not to be rude at all but you cannot offer the support Compaq or IBM can. (Not unless you want to spend tones of money on tech support and hire new people) Also again not to be rude but in one of your posts you say that RAID is not reliable. It may not be if an unskilled person installs it. But if you thought this then that would hint at your knowledge of servers is that great. (Not that mine is super extreme awsome but then again I would never build a server for anyone. I know what I would put in it but its not worth the trouble.) Also you could of been refering to IDE RAID then all that I said would need to be ignored.
I have worked for a place that had there server self built and I would say it was the worst decision ever. I know some places that have had one build by local computer shops and they are very happy with them but I know many more that are not.
So long post short don't go into this sector. You might want to do consulting for them but I would not venture out into this market.
Just my .0001 cents.
The only thing is he is wanting to be compaq. Well sorta.
All I can say is don't. Not to be rude at all but you cannot offer the support Compaq or IBM can. (Not unless you want to spend tones of money on tech support and hire new people) Also again not to be rude but in one of your posts you say that RAID is not reliable. It may not be if an unskilled person installs it. But if you thought this then that would hint at your knowledge of servers is that great. (Not that mine is super extreme awsome but then again I would never build a server for anyone. I know what I would put in it but its not worth the trouble.) Also you could of been refering to IDE RAID then all that I said would need to be ignored.
I have worked for a place that had there server self built and I would say it was the worst decision ever. I know some places that have had one build by local computer shops and they are very happy with them but I know many more that are not.
So long post short don't go into this sector. You might want to do consulting for them but I would not venture out into this market.
Just my .0001 cents.
hahahahaha... custom built servers!
Your only hope is to see if dell/ibm/compaq offer some sort of reseller program, where you sell the machine, but the support comes from them.
Other than that, well I guess you can fleece the hell out of them by trickign them into buying custom built servers. Hahahahahahahaha
bart
Your only hope is to see if dell/ibm/compaq offer some sort of reseller program, where you sell the machine, but the support comes from them.
Other than that, well I guess you can fleece the hell out of them by trickign them into buying custom built servers. Hahahahahahahaha
bart
I work for a smallish-ISP and I thought I'd chime in.
SCSI is crazy expensive, and almost 100% not worth it -- In the Small Business World. The premiums for the tiny bit of performance/reliability is insane. We run RAID 1 everywhere and backup everything at least once a day, with differential dB and critical backups happening 2-3 times a day. If a HD fails, it is not a huge deal -- the raid is on there, waiting to pick up, and if the box cooks the data, it's a small matter to restore from tape. Backsup = godsend.
And the other thing is that *NO* ISP uses actual modems in a rack anymore. Everyone uses rackmount RAS units -- have have two, each have space for 4 PRIs, or 92 each, 184 phone lines. We do not have 180+ modems, we have 2, 2U boxes.
$.02
randal
SCSI is crazy expensive, and almost 100% not worth it -- In the Small Business World. The premiums for the tiny bit of performance/reliability is insane. We run RAID 1 everywhere and backup everything at least once a day, with differential dB and critical backups happening 2-3 times a day. If a HD fails, it is not a huge deal -- the raid is on there, waiting to pick up, and if the box cooks the data, it's a small matter to restore from tape. Backsup = godsend.
And the other thing is that *NO* ISP uses actual modems in a rack anymore. Everyone uses rackmount RAS units -- have have two, each have space for 4 PRIs, or 92 each, 184 phone lines. We do not have 180+ modems, we have 2, 2U boxes.
$.02
randal
Can you explain what RASes and PRIs are?
And yeah, I didn't think anyone used a box full of modems anymore... seemed odd to me.A "RAS" is a Remote Access Server -- it's usually a rackmountable unit that has a bunch of modems integrated onto a 'motherboard' of sorts. Some of them are setup to have modules that you can swap out manually in case one fails. We use some old Ascend MAX TNT 4096 RAS units -- 96 ports/modems per unit, which is enough for 4 PRIs.
A PRI stands for "Primary Rate Interface". It is essentially a 24-channel, 1.544mbps T-1 with one channel used for signalling and such. Hence, it provides 23 phone lines on two pairs of copper -- one 64kpbs phone line per channel. A lot of that 64kbps goes to waste when a user dials in, because at max, a user can use 56kbps (unless they're using ISDN (which uses 64kbps per channel)).
Cheers,
randal
A PRI stands for "Primary Rate Interface". It is essentially a 24-channel, 1.544mbps T-1 with one channel used for signalling and such. Hence, it provides 23 phone lines on two pairs of copper -- one 64kpbs phone line per channel. A lot of that 64kbps goes to waste when a user dials in, because at max, a user can use 56kbps (unless they're using ISDN (which uses 64kbps per channel)).
Cheers,
randal
Sorry about the insult, I did take it over the top.
But after reading through damn near the entire thread I noticed that most of the responses were off base or simply wrong. On most forums the highly technical section is for remotely educated answers on difficult questions. In other words if you don't know the correct answer or want to argue over the merits of a TNT M64 vs a GF4 then go to the video forum or just read the correct answers - you may actually learn something. I only responded because I saw quite a few "myths" getting in the way of helping this guy get a better server like...
etc.etc.etc.... and that was all within the first ten posts - before the video argument.
Now that I have looked through the post again there were indeed some good answers for this guy. But he also should have explained that he is looking to build these for a business, to sell them. If that is the case I would suggest that NightFlyer goes off to college and gets a double major in electronic engineering and computer science.
But after reading through damn near the entire thread I noticed that most of the responses were off base or simply wrong. On most forums the highly technical section is for remotely educated answers on difficult questions. In other words if you don't know the correct answer or want to argue over the merits of a TNT M64 vs a GF4 then go to the video forum or just read the correct answers - you may actually learn something. I only responded because I saw quite a few "myths" getting in the way of helping this guy get a better server like...
etc.etc.etc.... and that was all within the first ten posts - before the video argument.
Now that I have looked through the post again there were indeed some good answers for this guy. But he also should have explained that he is looking to build these for a business, to sell them. If that is the case I would suggest that NightFlyer goes off to college and gets a double major in electronic engineering and computer science.
Guess I'll try to answer your question. It depends. It all depends on what the server is supposed to do. Compaq, Sun, Dell and IBM have servers from the small to the very big.
Now if we're just talking about an easy application server (web, ftp, e-mail, DNS, caching, firewall) or other single service box then blade servers are very attractive because of their limited space. Something like 12-16 servers in a 4u unit.
I'll try to explain how I view hardware.
Hardware is a comoditity. Just a box. So hardware should be interchangible without worry of data or applications. For example all of our Wintel servers are from three model lines only, that our NOC and support staff keep 6 servers on spare, two of each model with the max processor/cache/memory of any one server. Any server has a problem (and they will) it is a simple matter of disconnecting a few cables and slapping a new server in its place. Same with even the big dog sunfire 6800/880s except we rely on sun's four hour response for the replacement, redundancy is handled at the application layer to provide maximum uptime.
No time for troubleshooting and head scratching. Trouble with server, replace in 30 minutes. Biggest advantage here is that there is NO internal disk on the server - they're just processor and memory. All disk is held in a large SAN connected via two fiber channel cards on each server for redundancy. So the SANs job is to hold dozens of TB of data in a high-performance, RAID array and handle backups. The server is just processor and memory, a comodity item. The data and applications have value.
So after all the babbling what does a server need/need to do?
1) serve up data/apps
2) high availability features like management/alerting/raid/redundant PS, fully hot-swappable hardware everywhere.
3) Performance - scalable in processing, memory, (disk if you need it)
4) I/O performance for network, disk, memory
5) NO, you do not ever use IDE in a server
6) Stability - shoulda put this one at number two. A server needs to run for years without trouble, that means hardcore driver development, certification, testing as offered by the big four.
Now I can't comment much on building a server from scratch but I'm sure there are solid systemboards out there that could meet some of the above criteria. Match that with a similar IO board, raid controller if you need disk and you're all set.
I'd bet they have a good stable video card built in the system board/IO board.
ps - NightFlyerGTI, I love your signature.
One golden exception to (5) - never to use IDE in a server.
In a few of the servers I manage, we do have IDE in there as secondary drives for purpose of archival of non important information. 73Gb of SCSI is expensive, 80Gb of IDE is dirt cheap.
The IDE drives house the Ghost images, previous years data in read-only format that is permanently archived on tape but left on the server to allow access to it should it ever be needed etc. The IDE drives are accessed about 10-50 times a day per server. The SCSI drives have tens of thousands of hits per day
Nothinman
Elite Member
- Sep 14, 2001
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You can't make a blanket statement like "no IDE in any server", there are situations when IDE would be perfectly fine and SCSI wouldn't be cost effective and/or overkill. An obvious choice would be a dhcp server, 99% of all it's work is done in memory and the leases file is very small if you do want to back it up somewhere.
Not every server is a file server that's disk I/O bound.
Not every server is a file server that's disk I/O bound.
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