Windows 2000 Server as a File Server?

[live4spd]

We have come to a point here at my workplace that we wish to no longer continue our Novell file server. This file server has served us well for 4 years and contains about 500GB of priceless company data. We cannot justify paying $8000 to upgrade to NW6 so we are considering using Windows 2000 as a file server platform.

What kind of performance can I expect and what specific tweaks should I apply etc? If you have personal experience in this matter I would love to hear it. Just bear in mind this is for an Architecture firm with large CAD files, and 3D Renderings. We will have at least 50 with potentially 80 employees.

The hardware I'm going to use is an identical server to our current NW server. It is a Dell Poweredge 4100. It is equiped with a 1GB NIC, 2GB of ram a PERC2 Raid controller w/128MB and dual P3 700's. Drive configuration is 2x18's in RAID-0 (probably) for the OS, and 8x36GB for RAID-5. Of course we can't feasibly run compression on W2k (we use on the fly compression with NW) so we are going to have to buy some more drives or not copy all the data.

What are your opinions on this?

Thanks!

 

[Smilin]

I'm not super familiar with the 4100. I'm thinking it may be a discontinued model. In any case with only 80 users, 2GB of ram and dual processors is probably pretty bad overkill unless you plan on running applications off of this as well. Plain old file serving is pretty easy stuff. As for disk space that ain't gonna cut it. 8x36 is only going to give you about 250gig. Less if you put a hot-spare drive into the mix (recommended). You might want to look into some of Dell's NAS (powervault line of servers). Since it sounds like you just need a huge hard drive with high reliability and a NIC shoved up it...the NAS stuff will probably meet your needs a bit better. We are running a Powervault 760N here. It's using the 128mb perc controllers, I believe a single 733 processor. It has two external raid arrays connected to it. One is full of 36GB drives and the other is half full. It gives us about 510GB of space running in raid 5 with a hot-spare on each array. I don't recall the price but it was ludicrous - like half of what compaq or IBM were offering at the time. Dell has this thing - they are after market share and will not let themselves get beat on price. It also lets you take "snapshots" so you can run backups in the middle of the day - real nice when backing up that much data.

As for Windows 2000 - it should serve you well. Brush up on your AGLP (find a microsoft book if you don't know). NT based file/folder permissions are handled a bit differently than Novell and some hard work at the beginning can make day to day maintenance easy in the long run. Our switchover from Novell went pretty smoothly but our user group management gets a bit cluttered sometimes because we were trying to apply permissions netware-style in an NT environment - it works but allowing yourself to be "assimilated" properly by Microsoft is better in the long run

Get in contact with this guy: Tyler_Dorsey@Dell.com he's an account exec for the midwest and really one of the best and most reliable sales guys I've met from any company. He won't steer you wrong and he'll be around long after the sale is completed. Tell him Josh from SMC sent you.

 

[Nothinman]

I would stick with NetWare if you really want performance. We still have NetWare 4.12 boxes serving files for us, what is forcing you to upgrade to 6?

Depending on the type of data it could be anywhere from similar speeds to annoying slow. Access databases seem to be one of the worst, we had a group where I work try moving an Access database from NetWare to NT and after a few weeks they came back asking for it to be put back on NetWare because it was almost unusably slow on the NT box.

I would mirror the OS drive, not RAID-0. You don't need the added performance and you really don't need the added chance of data loss.

 

[Vegito]

I'm using a 4300 with 768meg ram and using dual mirror 10k raid for boot and 4 seagate 180gb in raid 5 for data. For some reason, there is some sort of memory leak... lots of excel file & sharing.

System has mcafee install and pgp, runs apache for intranet.. test ur apps for load and stuff.. it's not bad.. but i had 512mb before and it crash a lot.. adding more memory is better.. i have around 30 users...

 

[vash]

Here's a thought: SAMBA

If you setup a Samba network, you could easily go without a license and spend more on the hardware. Better yet, get a series of NAS systems to replace the Novell. NAS is relatively cheap to get, easy to admin and easier to upgrade (just plug and GO!).

NT4 licenses should be easy to come by and cheap, definitely worth looking into for some cheapo file sharing and a NT network.

vash