advice About enterprise servers...

[George.]

Hey, so I have this project at uni - I have to design (theoretically) a digital system for submitting, tracking, storing and analyzing data about a lot of electrical and mechanical machines in a given industry (say the railroad one in my country). Since they log all info on paper, my job is to design a digital system for that. So apart from databases, a client of some sort and all that, I have to look into enterprise servers.

Enterprise networking is mandatory imo as well, however that isn't on focus.

Anyone in the industry able to give some information about respected vendors and what not? I know HPE is used a lot for this, but I don't know much about enterprise specific stuff. 

Considering the workload, the server should be more storage based (since we don't have much for the cpus to do let alone the gpus...).

I guess a decentralized solution would be best if budget allows it, but even if we stick to a single server rack, what should I aim for?

Also not sure on the optimal topology to deploy this system in all together. 

Since it's for a national institution, it has to be pretty legit, although quite cheap considering we're talking about the Balkans haha.

I can and will do my research in the web, I'm just curious as to what you guys would be able to tell me on the subject of enterprise servers (ofc not the most expensive stuff, nor heavy compute oriented).

 

Thanks in advance and cheers!

[Lurick]

A few vendors come to mine:

Dell

HPE (as you mentioned)

Lenovo

Cisco

 

Depending on what you need, pre-built or heavy customization, it could sway your decision but most of the above have configuration tools you can play with as well to spec things out.

[Morgan MLGman]

HPE and DELL are good but most expensive.
Fujitsu and Lenovo are just as good in reality, but cheaper usually.

If you want a more budget-friendly one, you can look at SuperMicro as they make their own servers as well as supply tons of companies with their servers as OEM devices for the companies to brand as theirs.

That being said, you would probably be best off if you used a 1U server as the "head" of the system, it should be equipped with SSDs, and use a budget-friendly storage array for data. Something like a Lenovo/IBM Storwize V3000-series (V3700 for example) with another disk shelf if you need even more space would do the job quite well.
You connect that array to the server directly and you're golden.

To build the best system possible, you need to determine which part of the system is the most heavily used (storage or compute) and then go from there. If fast and/or reliable storage is important, a dedicated storage array would be ideal.