Anybody with experience building servers please respond

[Pepper]

At my workplace we need some new servers, I am given the task of figuring out exactly what to buy then convincing those who will spend the money why it's the best choice. It's a MS shop, with web hosting and development and SQL database as the primary needs. Our current servers are a mix of P3-XEON machines (HP netservers and compaq) that were cheap and used. They won't handle the load anymore.

I have looked at parts from Intel and barebones servers from SuperMicro. They don't want to spend the big bucks on HP/Compaq, IBM or Dell. The Intel stuff seems overly complicated to design a good server around. The SuperMicro seems a good fit and I am confident about which parts (proc, ram, hd, etc) I need to get to go with them but I have no experience good or bad with this brand. Any other product lines I need to be looking at, any I need to steer away from?

Any input is welcome but I ask that if you reference a specific brand it be one that you have direct experience with.

 

[TuxCoder]

Where I work we have many SuperMicro based systems but of course they all run Linux, no MS. One great board they make, the X5DL8-GG, has 4 separate PCI-X buses (6 slots) that come in real handy for one of our products.

The only issue we've seen with those boards was one model had a certain Serverworks chipset that acted a little funny (but nothing too serious) with an old Linux kernel. Needless to say, that problem has been resolved with updated software.

 

[Pepper]

Tux, that board you mention looks quite similar to one I actually have been looking at, the X5DP8-G2, except that it uses the Intel E7501 chipset instead of ServerWorks, and some other minor differences.

 

[Pepper]

anybody else care to give me some input on this?

 

[cdru]

Have you sat down and done any type of benchmarking or evaluation of your existing servers to see where the bottlenecks are at? There is no point in getting a 4-way Xeon box when your processes are disk-bound. Likewise, no point in getting the fastest, most expensive RAID controller when the processes are CPU bound.

As to what brand, you get what you pay for in some cases, but also remember that there is more to the cost then just raw power/speed. The name brand boxes like Dell, IBM, Compaq may not perform a whole lot better then a white box alternative, but what happens in 2 years when something goes south and you need to replace a controller card or mainboard, and your manufacturer no longer carries one?

My company builds POS (that's point of sale) servers for hardware stores. To us support and the availability of parts to quickly repair a server are much more important then the best price and performance. We can't, and neither can our customers who own the hardware stores, afford to wait several days for a part to be located...or even worse find out it's not available and we have to rebuild a system from scratch. I know our service contracts with IBM and Dell stipulate a 4-hour repair time.

 

[Pepper]

Yes, we have tweaked everything that is tweakable on these old machines, it is just time to add more horsepower as our business is growing tremendously over what we were expecting.

Regarding the bottlenecks:
Bandwidth - not a problem, our primary servers are colocated with 10Mbps and multiple paths to the Internet.
Processor/RAM - our database server is maxed on both and still slows noticeably under load with high utilization. The web/application servers are not quite as bad but could use some help. We can alleviate this by adding more duplicate web servers.
Disk - we have already separated major functionality onto separate raid partitions. Example, the biggest web server has OS, swap, site content and logs on different physical drive arrays. The database files and logs are separate.

And it seems that for the cost of one name-brand server with the expensive warranty and onsite repair, I can get two or three of the build-my-own and have plenty of spare parts onhand.

Again, I'm just trying to get input on what brands to look at and any good or bad experiences people have had.

 

[Ilya]

I like Dells and don't think they are too expensive. Excellent support! And you can quickly configure and price everything on their web site...

 

[Pepper]

That's why I'm looking at SuperMicro et al, cause the boss just about gave birth to bovine livestock when I showed him how much new Dell servers would cost.