Sourcing reliable server

Searcher2

As I am more or less confined to my house with a dislocated ankle I volunteered to help a friend out with looking at his backup processes and general setup for his web based business. He wants a fast server with 3 year next day on site warranty. My initial reaction was to just go with Dell but these days Dell machines aren't just supplied by Dell. There seem to be quite a few resellers with seemingly more attractive prices.

He's currently effectively running a PC with no raid as a server. I really don't know what the difference is between a PC with RAID set up and the 'servers' Dell sell.

I am happy to do a lot of Googling (I have enough time) but I was hoping for a kick start from the money saving point of view with regards to other suppliers of reliable machines and/or whether buying a PC and sticking a RAID card in it would be just as good a solution.

For a bit of background there are 7 PCs linked to the existing server which hosts web server, Notes server, SMTP mail, backups of the 7 PCs important data (which is Rsynched back to each of the PCs as further backup). This total space used is currently less than 100GB but would increase significantly if we implemented a backup policy to keep daily copies for a week, weekly for a month, monthly for 6 months (for example) but presumably this data may be better stored on a separate NAS server anyway.

I do appreciate I can go away and find it all out for myself... I am sure I could just go to Dell and buy a server from it's vast array but I don't want to buy something too complex/expensive for something that is probably quite simple. Any suggestions would be welcome.

James_cuck

I like the post on sourcing reliable server.

Chimpofdoom

NVM never read post.. give me a tic

tronator

Searcher2 wrote: »

He's currently effectively running a PC with no raid as a server. I really don't know what the difference is between a PC with RAID set up and the 'servers' Dell sell.

Servers usually have components which are meant to run 24/7 and are more optimized for speed. You also can have redundant power supplies, rack mount chassis ...

Searcher2 wrote: »

For a bit of background there are 7 PCs linked to the existing server which hosts web server, Notes server, SMTP mail, backups of the 7 PCs important data (which is Rsynched back to each of the PCs as further backup). This total space used is currently less than 100GB but would increase significantly if we implemented a backup policy to keep daily copies for a week, weekly for a month, monthly for 6 months (for example) but presumably this data may be better stored on a separate NAS server anyway.

Since you mentioned rsync I assume it's a *nix server. You can run rsync with with the "--link-dest=" parameter which creates hard links to the previous backup before backing up everything. This way you have a full backup but you only need additional space for files which changed. Something like

rsync -azP --delete --link-dest=<previous backup><source> <destination>

But a proper backup should be made to a different server or better to a different location. Rsync can run over ssh too.

If the PC's run Windows I would run a Samba PDC and leave the user's documents on the server. Then you don't need to sync it forth and back, which is better done by unison than rsync anyway.

diable

It all depends on his budget as £1k won't get you much but £10k will.

weegie.geek

What? A grand's worth will be more than enough for what he wants it for, especially if there's no windows license to buy.

diable

weegie.geek wrote: »

What? A grand's worth will be more than enough for what he wants it for, especially if there's no windows license to buy.

Spec one up then with raid level 5 and 3 year next day warranty and lets see what you can come up with, if you are running a business it needs to be reliable with minimum down time as if its off line it costs you money.

amcluesent

RAID isn't a backup mechanism, it just increases system availability. You need to be thinking about a tape streamer with tapes on rotation on-premise in the safe and a system of keeping end of month tapes off site.

tronator

diable wrote: »

Spec one up then with raid level 5 and 3 year next day warranty and lets see what you can come up with, if you are running a business it needs to be reliable with minimum down time as if its off line it costs you money.

Where have you been the last 10-15 years? It has been a while since I paid more than £2000 for a decent server...

Of course, you don't buy such a machine from Dell on-line. You call them and get quite some discount. And of course, don't pay the MS tax.

bob_man_uk

just be careful about dell and their "oh so wonderful 3 year on site warranty whatever" malarky, remember the server is in the hands of the engineer, and ive had some horribly shocking dell engineers in the past.

I wont go into the long story but it turns out the engineer had left the failed hard drive in the sevrer and then wondered why the raid wouldnt rebuild... then he waltzed off with the GOOD hard drive, even though we had paid to keep it. I could have done the job better and could have saved the company a hell of a lot of money... at least one good thing came from the whole debacle. we bought as many external 1tb hard drives as we were allowed to request. did a complete system backup every night, previous backups stored in the safe, nightly backups removed off site, month end backups were couriered to another site.

Searcher2

tronator wrote: »

Since you mentioned rsync I assume it's a *nix server. You can run rsync with with the "--link-dest=" parameter which creates hard links to the previous backup before backing up everything. This way you have a full backup but you only need additional space for files which changed. Something like
But a proper backup should be made to a different server or better to a different location. Rsync can run over ssh too.

He does use rysnc to do incremental backups but the issue is if you discover a file has got corrupt and it got corrupted 3 months ago (for example) so he wants to be able to go back to when it wasn't corrupt.

In response to other posts - he was thinking about £1000 spend on a server machine. The RAID wasn't intended for backups - just in case of hard disk failure.

Many thanks for the responses so far. Very useful. I'll digest them more when I get back from hospital (just off now).