Building a server

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Devastater6194

Devastater6194

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My friend is looking to build a video hosting website and asked me to help. The website is only starting out with a few Gb of video at the moment. Now I can build a basic computer, gaming pc, workstation whatever but I don't have any experience with servers. So what am I looking for the server? I'm thinking of an 1155 Xeon with lots of RAM and and hard drives in raid (whatever the one that backs It all up). Am I on the right track?
Oh and his budget is £600-£800.
 
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13thmonkey

13thmonkey

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why buy a server, when you can rent? let someonelse deal with the big pipe, backups, redundant power etc.

Amazon S3, might be appropriate and for a month with 500GB of storage and 1TB of outbound traffic it'd only cost you $60. And no internet pipe costs.
 
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Devastater6194

Devastater6194

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Because he worked out that for the price of a years rent, he Could build a server himself which would give him more direct control. Plus it would be good to put on his CV.
 
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13thmonkey

13thmonkey

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which OS are you planning on using? any of the MS server OS's would blow your budget.

you'll need a case that can take redundant PSU's at least 4 HDD's in raid 5 with 1 as a hot spare, so 4 2TB drives will give you 4TB of space, RAM not so much. Server grade processors not so important. The question is where are you going to put it so that you have good upload speed and not have Acceptable Use policies? 1.5Mb/s is not really enough.

The CV argument is duff, it'll be on CV with the cloud word if you use managed service (thats even better in CV buzzword bingo terms). If he can't build it I doubt he can manage the physical machine, so you'll be on call...

he's done the sums and figured out someone else can build and support it for him? It sound like fun, but thats all it should be for the builder.
 
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smorizio

smorizio

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boot drive 5400 rpm hard drive. will have windows or server os of chose. tyan has some nice atx server mb with video. in both intel and amd. the amd cpu may be cheaper. toss it into a standard 60.00 case with a good power supply!!!. and it should last him a few years.
 
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nigelren

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You could always go for an existing server off E-Bay. You can buy a DL585 G2 ( £300 ) which has dual PSU's, quad processor, 32GB ram, dual NIC, RAID ( up to 8 2.5" drives ) with battery backed write.
 
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Brett928S2

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Hi :)

Notice the word TWIN in my post ? and I meant including a server mobo.... my company builds these and £600 is NOT going to do it...no way in the world....

All the best Brett :)
 
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nigelren

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I think the difference here is what he wants from the server. The machine your looking at has a lot of single points of failure ( so if any one of them fails then the machine is dead e.g. - single PSU ). If uptime is important then perhaps dual PSU as well as enough drives to make a decent RAID array.
Also if you look at the spec. -it has 4GB of RAM, not exactly the 'lots of RAM' you talked about in your first post.
The big limitation though I can think of is the 4 drive bays, this doesn't leave much room for expansion. If you want a RAID 10 setup - then 4 drives is a minimum.

 
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Devastater6194

Devastater6194

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Didn't mean to snap sorry. Do you think Dual CPU's is necessary then. Can you point to a server which would be ideal?

Are the power supplies in Servers the same as normal pc psu's with something like this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/850va-fsp-480w-uninterruptible-power-supply-(ups)-ep850 or special server PSU's?

Also, thought you owned a laptop shop?
 
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Brett928S2

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Hi :)

Yes I own a lappy repair Company , but I also own a Computer company with shops, which also builds Custom machines and Servers...

I think you need to actually decide what sort of machine you want....

The word SERVER is bandied around a lot , when actually people just mean a powerful machine...

Servers have built in reliability and things like raided or scsi drives, for the ultimate in reliability and are designed to run 24/7/365

And they aint cheap lol :)

All the best Brett :)
 
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Devastater6194

Devastater6194

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That is exactly what we want but as i said in my first post, i don't know much about servers so i don't know how much it would cost.
Are 1366 servers still worth investing in? Something like this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4u-supermicro-7046t-h6r-intel-5520-s-1366-x2-pci-e-20-ddr3-1333-1066-sas-sata-raid-r800w-psu with a couple of these http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-xeon-e5620-s-1366-westmere-ep-quad-core-240ghz-586gt-s-qpi-12mb-cache-80w-retail and one of these http://www.scan.co.uk/products/850va-fsp-480w-uninterruptible-power-supply-(ups)-ep850 ?
 
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Brett928S2

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Hi :)

You really only need to answer two questions to solve this....

Do you want to pay THOUSANDS for a server ??? (Two thousand minimum, usually a lot more)

Or do you just want a powerful machine capable of doing a lot of things at once ??? (cost £700 to £1500)

All the best Brett :)
 
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Robert751

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I can't get the specs now I'm on vacation but he uses it to created spreadsheets on it, he keeps all of the info about the jobs that his company has done. He runs a lot of programs at once and the pc still is fast. I also run a minecraft server on it that he doesn't know of :p
 
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