[PLUG] "server" quality components

Terry Griffin griffint at pobox.com
Thu Jan 13 03:55:18 UTC 2005


On Wednesday 12 January 2005 7:03 pm, Carla Schroder wrote:
> yo pluggers,
>
> I rarely have the luxury of a healthy budget for buying or building
> new boxes; like most of us, I've made a career out of coaxing a
> little more life out of old Frankenhardware. Well, I'm starting a new
> project where there is actually enough budget to purchase some decent
> hardware. I am giddy with excitement. There will be two standalone
> servers: one IMAP and one Apache web server. The mailserver will have
> about 300 accounts. Not sure yet how much traffic is expected for the
> Web server, or if it is going to be burdened with horrid scripts or
> what. These are not quite mission-critical, maybe one step below
> mission-critical.
>
> Would it make sense to go for server-quality mainboards, NICs, power
> supplies, and all those good things? We already decided on tower
> cases, for easy maintenance and future expansion, so box real estate
> is not a problem. What do you get in a "server" mobo or NIC anyway
> that you don't get in the cheep stuff?
>

For me what makes a server is the hard drive subsystem, namely a
top-of-the-line SCSI controller with top-of-the-line SCSI drives.
Generally you'll get better results if you get a SCSI controller on
the mainboard instead of using an add-on card. So that's the main
consideration for the mainboard.

Next put your money toward top-quality power supplies and fans,
and select your case for good airflow.

After that I tend to go for the same commodity components that you
might find in a typical desktop PC, but things that some people
would look for depending on the intended use include:

- Server management functionality on the mainboard such as IPMI
- Wake-on-LAN feature in the NICs
- Hardware RAID

And more things that are not coming to my mind at the moment.

Terry



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