NEW SERVER HELP

[sk2327]

Hello everyone,

 

I am new to this forum, had a question about buying a server for my small-medium business requirement.

 

I need to run an ERP solution for my company with at least 7 to 8 nodes initially, This server will act as a application and a database server, running SQL enterprise edition.

 

My ERP company has given me a rough frame work as below:

 

Server Type: Rack Server

Process Type: Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge based Xeon Quad Core process L3 8 MB Cache with 64 bit architecture

RAM:10-14 GB

HDD: 600 GB(Minimum)with raid 1 or 5

 

But having little to no idea about buying servers, i sought out for help.

 

The server has to be future proof for a least 5-7 years  

 

Suggest me the Best company i should go for,  wether i should invest in SATA/SAS/SSD.

 

How to get it done as efficiently as possible. Budget : $2000 - $ 3500 

 

Thanks you.

[EmeraldFlame]

Honestly, I would go to Dell's website, and go into their server configuration, and play with things until you find a configuration you like in your price range. Honestly at $3500 you could probably manage to get something much more powerful than those minimum specs.

 

Honestly for future performance, especially that long of a time frame, I would suggest a much more powerful processor. Something like the Xeon® Processor E5-2630 v3 should handle what you want very well. 8 cores, hyperthreaded, 2.4GHz, turbo up to 3.2GHz, 20MB cache, Haswell based (newer than Sandy / Ivy). If you really want to be ahead of the curve on processing power, find a mobo you can slot two of those into and you will be golden for a long time.

 

For Ram I would definitely be shooting for a minimum of 16GB of ECC memory at the low end. 32GB would probably be my 'recommended' here.

 

As for storage space, this is pretty much up to you, and depends on how much space you use and what kind of business your in. A film studio working with hours of 4k video is going to need a lot more storage space than an accountants office saving spreadsheets and PDFs.

 

As for the RAID level to run the drives in, it depends on whether downtime is acceptable for you or not. With RAID 1 there will essentially be no downtime. When a drive fails, the secondary drive kicks in, you replace the dead drive, and it rebuilds itself, no downtime. With RAID 5 when a drive fails, the array will continue to work, however it will be significantly slower because it will be working out of the parity data for the dead drive. Even once the dead drive is replaced it will continue to be slow until the new drive is able to rebuild. A process that can take on the level of hours or days depending on the size of the drive. RAID 1 is much more expensive because 1/2 of your total drive space is taken up by redundancy. With RAID 5 only 1 harddrive size is taken up with redundancy. So if you use for example 4x 3TB drives in RAID 1 you will have 6TB usable and in RAID 5, 9TB useable. It really just depends what is acceptable for you.

 

For servers, I have always like Dell. For enterprise stuff like this their build quality in my experience has been great, they offer a lot of configuration options at the time of order, and they have pretty good enterprise support too, and I have never had trouble with warranty work on the enterprise side with them. 

 

As for SATA/SAS/SSD, honestly SATA 3 (6Gbps) is going to be fast enough for any hard drive, and for most enterprise environments SSD's just don't make sense. Typically your bottleneck is going to be the network connection in most cases, not the read/write times. I mean an SSD bootdrive might be nice, but once again in an enterprise environment doesn't really make sense, because once set up and configured the server shouldn't be rebooting very often anyway. The only thing an SSD would give you is slightly faster access times, but that typically isn't worth the cost associated with them at this level. 

 

Hope that helps out a little.

[Darren]

Don't use RAID5, 6 at a minimum.

[twosome]

If you are supposed to run multiple roles on one host, I would really encourage you to make a virtual environment. Buy the host you want, preferably 6-8 cores and 32-64 GB memory. Do a RAID 6 or 10 with some enterprise drives.

 

As for the software you have basically two choices, VMware or Hyper-V. I would go with the latter. Then you just have to buy a 2012 R2 Datacenter license and you are all figured out.

Run the host as a Hyper-V role ONLY, then make virtual machine for every other role you may want. This way it so much easier to administrate, and much harder to mess up. Do daily backups with Veeam or other preferred software for your backup. If you do need to restore, in the worst cases simply restore the vhdx-file, its THAT easy.

[sk2327]

Thank you so much guys, that was really help full.

 

For this point of time, i have decided to go for a Dell R 730xd, with E5 2620v3, 16Gigs DDR4 (more can be added anytime), 4*300GB SAS RAID 10.

 

Thank you so much for your help.

 

:-)