The majority of my file servers are desktops with Rosewill external drive enclosures (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132016) loaded with Seagate SATA drives. Unfortunately I have been plagued with hardware failures for what seems like months.

I have several web/file/mail servers that I would like to consolidate into 1 or 2 physical machines running VM's, but I'm concerned about drive failures. I currently run software raid. I plan on continuing that.

Am I better off getting a rack mountable server and a JBOD or a high capacity storage server? Any suggestions would be great!

I have about 200-250 users. My setup is CentOS with about 1/2 linux clients (NIS with NFS mounting home dirs) and 1/2 windows using Samba (not mounting home dirs just using for storage).

I use dell R710's with two SAS drives on a hardware raid for NFS servers, they always get the job done and I have never had one completely go down. Had a few drive failures but they rebuild the RAID on the fly and are hot-swappable.

I'm an HP guy, DL380's can be loaded with disks (especially if you take the second drive bay option which increases the capacity to 16 2.5" hot-swap disks). We run multiple CentOS servers on these using Citrix XenServer. The nice thing about the DL380's is that they come with 4 NICs, so it's easy to bond these into a pair for an internal LAN and a pair for a DMZ if you happen to want machines in both "camps".

As was said above, RAID is essential in any server hardware and I would also recomment dual power-supplies, one in to the mains and one in to a UPS.

Our main webserver environment has a mix of 15 DL360'S and DL380's and we've never had problems.

Last company I was with had an estate of around 20 DL380s and in 6 years of 24/7/365 running had a total of two hard disk failures which were hot swapped with no issue.

HP DL380 = Dell R710. And a note here is that you mentioned it came with 4 NICs. These servers are custom config buys, so your company buys them with 4 NICs there really is no "default" config unless you consider the base to be the mobo,cpu,psu,RAM and case.

All of the benefits highlighted by TenTenths are correct for both manufacturers, basically do you want to drive a Ford or Chevy is what it comes down to in this instance.

I would find something on Ebay or from the Vendor directly that fits within your budget, then you can post some specs here to get some feedback from other users.

Something like this would be a great setup for you and you would have plenty of room to scale up if you need it:

http://www.buy.com/prod/dell-powered....html?s_kwcid=

If you want a good system then you can't go to newegg. I love the place but you need enterprise level hardware.

That means HP, Dell, IBM, intel maybe, I used to recommend Sun even. Their products are made for business. Their drives are spec'd for industry.

Personally, I do not recommend IBM boxes to anyone. I have had nothing but problems with them

Well I've never agreed an particular config with my vendor in terms of number of NICs and all the DL380 G7s I've ordered have came with 4 on the mobo backplane.

I would agree that the Dell 2950 is a nice bit of kit, my own co-lo web server is a Dell 2950, I bought it in 2005 and it's been powered up in a datacenter ever since.

to Kustom42;
I see the whole "not recommending IBM" thing....if it were 2 years or so ago. Things have changed greatly. I recommend IBM x3XXX M3 series to anyone. They are cheap and seems to operate just fine. I am eagerly about to process a federal quote for 3 x 9250/server with each server having 128GB RAM(16 GB DIMMs)/2 x 2.6GHz 8-core CPU (32 cores total)/dual 750W PSU/mirror SAS RAID for boot/dual port 8Gbps fiber HBA/5 year warranty....all in a 1U server. Although me having a federal budget could change a lot of things....mainly in price.

They are lowering prices to meet new market abilities. HP and Dell are NOT doing this for me. They laugh at discounts and take like 2 weeks to generate a quote...maybe. Usually involves lots of calls and "forwarding" stuff to there "technical analyst". blah.

to OP:
now on to the recommendations. Shared storage is not really ever that cheap. Consider building a back blaze if you need to save money while supporting 200-300 users. I believe you can have mix of let's say 20 3TB drives and 20 SAS 10-15K RPM drives. This gives you great slow and fast storage. We run all of our VMs off of 7200RPM storage. Keep your RAID's manageable at 10-14 drives and you should be good.

I am confident that CPU/RAM wise, just one host (whether HP Dell or IBM) could handle your entire load on a setup similar to the one I have above. CPU RAM and NICs are the main squeeze for VMs. A lot of this you already know....just covering that topic in case.


as for the HP DL380 stuff: GEEZE. So expensive to have a pointless 3-4U machine just to have the ability to stack more CPU's and drives in a plane. The preliminary costs for that mother board/backplane is crazy. My theory is this: You get a backplane with 4 daughterboards...you better fill it now. It will quickly be a waste of money to have the backplane and chassis if you wait two years and then buy out of date hardware to fill it. At this point you spent 20-25K on a 3-4U server OR you are locked into that type of server based on the upgrade ability. blah...i hate the idea of not being able to branch out and mix/match servers. virtualization is the bridge between these gaps of conforming to similar servers.

I agree, we buy 360s (1U) or 380s (2U) stacked with processors and ram and choose depending on the number of disks needed. It's also a corporate decision to go with a single hardware vendor for servers for interchangability.

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I have purchased from http://www.serversdirect.com/ before. Noone has mentioned Supermicro.

They have JBOD's there. Not completely sure how to connect those to a server.

I do have some Dell 2650's, but disk space is an issue.