Hi Guys,

Linux n00b here so please be patient. Ive been give a "project" to work on by my boss as a way of keeping me busy during any downtime I have. Ive just setup a new file server using an old HP rack server, Im pretty please with myself its working like a treat however there are a few outstanding issues (I need to lock it down so if anyone knows any resources/guides to doing this send em on). In some ways its been a victime of its own success, the intention was to use it as a file-server for general sharing and for small backups (emails etc) however its now being used to do backups on a much larger scale and its 18Gb SCSI drive is about 80% full. The fact that everyone is doing backups is great but we dont have the capacity on that server and the "project" is to look into a comprehensive backup stragtegy which means basically a new server.

LIke everything else if money was not a problem I could have some real fun with this project but expense must be justified so the big question for me is how do I go about assesing hardware for use in the new server. The biggest problem as I see it is volume, while I can get a nice SCSI setup which would be damn fast because Im limited by price Im limited in volume. However if I were to go the route of a nice tower PC with RAID and IDE I can get some serious volume for the same money and as the comapny is growing I will need the volume. At the moment in order to backup everything in the place I would need about 200GB and if it were RAID the price for that is hefty let alone if it were SCSI. The other thing is speed, SCSI would be nice but expensive (if its needed it will be bought) but there is 15 users at the moment would IDE be able to handle this. How do I asess the performance of the server in this context? I want to be fairly smart about it rather than just throwing a whack load of hardware at it and knowing it will work. Any suggestions, links to websites, comments etc would be really helpful.

PDD

what about SATA drives? they are faster than IDE and not as expensive as SCSI. Also, the volumes can be really big.

You can also RAID SATA, although I haven't done it.
Hamish

If performance, stability, and reliability will be important, as I assume they would be given the new "high profile" status that the server now has, I would recommend sticking with SCSI, and implement RAID.

While other technologies have their good points, I would consider SCSI to be the gold standard for production systems, and although it may be more expensive than other alternatives I don't think it would be hard to justify. (You might consider it this way - if the other alternatives are better, why isn't the company using them exclusively and getting rid of all the SCSI drives?)

I don't consider myself to have enough expertise on this topic to make specific recommendations, but hopefully others here will. FYI - this question may be better suited for the Enterprise forum - if you'd like it to be moved there click on the "Report this post" link and request it.

Either way, good luck with it and congrats on the success you've had so far with this project -- J.W.