Where are the differences between consumer hardware and professional server products? Tom's Hardware evaluates professional components and their characteristics.

Not that I'm an expert, but like the article states, server hardware is chosen based on it's stability.  Server admins are usually willing to sacrifice speed for uptime.  A high end desktop will have more raw performance than a single server blade.
 
And, servers are a lot more proprietary than desktops.  Building a server is a more rigorous exercise than a desktop because most computer parts are compatible in a desktop while the opposite is true for a server.
 
Another note of interest, in a lot of servers (especially HP) the BIOS is not stored on a mobo chip.  Its stored in a small hard drive partition.  And often a server must be 'primed' through the BIOS to run a particular OS, which makes switching OS's take more steps.

I really appreciated this article and I look forward to it's successors.  As a PC enthusiast who has recently "made the plunge" into network support as a career, I am in need of articles like this that help me to expand my knowledge base.  Keep these articles coming!

I currently work for IBM as a System X/Blade Server Engineer. You left out the Tulsa Processors, the 71xx Line of processors. These are so great with 16MBL3 and 2x1MB L2. Either way good article.
 
Maybe next time you should talk about some Blades, and how they can save lots of space for less than that of several 2U or 3U rack mounts.

The difference? Server/enterprise markets need longer lifetimes for their hardware as it's quiet expensive to have to replace what can sometimes amount to hundreds of computers. RELIABILITY! They're designed for reliability and SPEED!  
 
Really good article, I'm big into this kind of stuff, hence I'm running dual-xeons and a couple SAS drives. I wish the Quadro FX 5600 was cheaper and could support SM 5.0, but oh well.

Another HUGE difference:
Enterprise class hardware scores low in 3dmark06.
 
 
Great article.

You mean like their workstation GPUs? Well, yeah... they're not meant for that kind of work, they're meant for stuff like Maya and CAD programs. I mean, you can game with them, sure, but DX and OpenGL are two different things. Then again, I'm not much of a gamer, what can I say?  
 
Speed is a huge factor though, that's why they have SAS drives, despite their small capacity.  
 
It's true though, it does score low in 3DMark06, but that rather irrelevant to the enterprise market anyways.

Lol sas drives are not so small any more. Setting next to me are 3 300gig sas drives that I cant use cause I dont have a SAS controller.
 
 
oh well! Makes for Atlas art.
 
Note joking about playing games on an enterprise server

I know they have 300GB SAS drives, but compared to like the 750GB and soon 1TB drives, they're expensive as far as GB/Dollar figures go. I have 2 147GB 15k rpm SAS drives in my rig right now, though I'm not using it since it eats up power like crazy.

300 gig sas drives were 1000$ last month...
 
Ya a bit expensive.

Correct me if im wrong but scsi drives and sas drives have read after write verify. I know the old ide drives did not but im not sure about sata drives. Back in the old days thats why we used scsi in servers. Faster, Longer Life and less chance of write erros.
Lee
 
I posted this comment in the wrong thread the first time if a fourm admin sees it please delete. sorry
Lee

Yeah, now I take it those are 10k rpms? I know that Seagate is making 15k 300GB drives, but those are at least like $1200. TOO MUCH! My 147GB drives are quite sufficient. That, and my SAS controller supports SATA drives so that saves me money!

I always wondering if Fiber Hard Drive was faster then Scsi, when i say faster i mean the read/write Xfers, acces time,etc...

Fiber provides greater bandwidth, but like just about every other interface out there it's limited by the I/O of the drive.

Would it be good for gaming, i know there some on ebay not that expensive. But the card can be holy expensive.

It wouldn't be any faster than a SCSI or SAS drive, and if you're concerned about gaming then your HDD has very little to do with the game, that's more based on your RAM, CPU and GPU.

Well my bad i say gaming but i was mean global performance vs exemple: Raptor Sata Drive.

Hmm... compared to a single SATA drive like a Raptor? SCSI and SAS really shine in like RAID, and where you have TONS of sequential reads and writes, but they're still fast.

 
scsi = sas btw.

Thanks for the tip. I had to go look it up.
 
SAS=Serial Attached SCSI and some SAS controllers can use SATA drives.
 
WIKI=new learning tool for the 21st century

In the larger corporate world you never write directly to a drive anyway, EMC and IBM's SHark units have all writes going into cache.  You never even see single drives on these units, just logical LUNS carved out by the Storage admins....Im a UNIX Admin that works closely with the Storage guys.  RELIABILITY comes first and performance second....sometimes a distant second in the Corporate world.

I know they're the same drives, just different interfaces... but thanks for clarifying that anyways.  
 
@immagikman
 
You bring up a good point, and it's true that you rarely see single drives on servers, maybe a small desktop in your little cubicle, but that wont' be SCSI. Yup, writing into cache is actually another good point. I think in the next part of this Server Primer they should bring up more of the differences between servers and consumer products.