File Server

Spammeh · 9 Jun 2011 at 11:13

Hi All,

We're looking at replacing one of our file servers at our head office and we've been given a budget of around 8k to do so, inc. OS and care packs etc.

Recently we've been buying the HP DL 380 G7's, as they seem to be a good all round versatile server however is there a better solution for file servers specifically.

Ideally, what I'd looked at was getting 8x 600GB SAS disks in a RAID5, and an additional PSU for redundancy. Alongside 2008 R2 I feel that would be a solid server to last us around 5 yrs (unfortunately thats the turnaround at the company I'm with).

Does anyone else have any better solutions for this to maybe take advantage of dedupe or anything else? Maybe using a blade combination or is the budget just too small for this?

Just thought I'd see if anyone had any better ideas. We're looking for a minimum of 2.5TB usable in real terms as we want to plan for expansion really.

Thanks

morfmedia · 13 Jun 2011 at 20:20

G7 is an awesome server. Perhaps get the 812 card, I've seen over 1GB / second file copies on our new G7's with SAS disks (Raid1 I think). I don't think you can go too far wrong with this hardware to be honest. How many ysers is it for? You won't do too much better unless you get an iscsi enclosure, I previously used IBM DS3300 couple of years ago. Not enough cash for dedupe etc I don't think.

You can always hang an MSA off the G7 for expansion

Vanilla · 14 Jun 2011 at 02:54

Have you thought about a small array that can do file (CIFS/NFS) natively?

The EMC VNXe will give you file deduplication natively along with a load of other features.

http://uk.emc.com/products/series/vnxe-series.htm#/3

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virt...things-in-tiny-transformer-like-packages.html

Read the above and check out the Windows File Sharing demo in the link

Means you can easily grow without being limited to the number of drive slots in a server - I think up to 90 drives with the samllest. Also iSCSI so you can provision storage to your other servers.

Spammeh · 14 Jun 2011 at 15:27

Cheers guys, I'm glad you have a similar opinion on G7's. We've used them extensively and they've performed well, and for a limited budget - they are very useful.

Vanilla, will look into those options - thanks mate