Looking for an entry level server for my business!

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Bes

Bes

Bes

Soldato
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Hi,

My little business will soon require an entry- level server to be located in our fulfillment org. premises.

The server will spend most of its day building PDFs using ImageMagick and a few other libraries, and will need to run some flavour of Linux (Probably CentOS). It does not need to be hugely powerful at this stage. It is a mission- critical piece of hardware though.

Can anyone recommend a well- priced server for us?

Thanks!
 
matthab said:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18216324

Comes with £100 cash back on the 250gb model so making it a £150 server :).
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I don't know that that covers the mission-critical bit :p

Something cheap from Dell (T110?), maybe two of, with a good backup system in place should suffice. Implement ESXi if you've got the know-how (though tbh it'd take you a couple of days to get to grips with the basics).

Failing that - maybe something cheap but well made off eBay?
 
In this context what does ‘mission critical’ actually mean?

How much is every hour of downtime going to cost in real money?

Is there any real budget to work to?
 
Basically if the server goes down, we can't make any product. I am thinking about either buying two or hosting something in 'the cloud' as a backup solution.

An hour's downtime would probably cost us about £100 profit, but could greatly damage our reputation as a lot of what we do is 'just in time'.

Budget- as cheap as possible as we are a tiny business.

In terms of storage, huge amounts would not be required certainly 1Tb would be plenty. 500Gb would probably suffice.
 
Get a couple of T110s, throw a couple of Tb drives in RAID in each, install ESXi, make your VMs and have them backup every night. You could probably do that for less than £1.5k. I'd suggest a tape drive to allow you to do off site backups, but you're near enough doubling the cost dependent on what you're doing. Maybe 2 x External HDDs in rotation?

That's a simplistic solution - but you haven't given much detail to go off. If you want specific solutions, including whether or not if would be feasible to use online backups, give more detail as to what you're doing :)
 
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slylittlefox said:
Get a couple of T110s, throw a couple of Tb drives in RAID in each, install ESXi, make your VMs and have them backup every night. You could probably do that for less than £1.5k. I'd suggest a tape drive to allow you to do off site backups, but you're near enough doubling the cost dependent on what you're doing. Maybe 2 x External HDDs in rotation?

That's a simplistic solution - but you haven't given much detail to go off. If you want specific solutions, including whether or not if would be feasible to use online backups, give more detail as to what you're doing :)
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If 1 hours downtime will cost £100. Then £1,500k would be equal to 15hours downtime. Chances are they're a 9-5 company, so that's nearly 48 hours to get the system back up and running.

For this sort of price point I'd look to get some cheap virtual hosting.
 
ecksmen said:
If 1 hours downtime will cost £100. Then £1,500k would be equal to 15hours downtime. Chances are they're a 9-5 company, so that's nearly 48 hours to get the system back up and running.

For this sort of price point I'd look to get some cheap virtual hosting.
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Eh? :confused: You're suggesting they use "cheap virtual hosting" to support a 'mission-critical' system? On top of which, they need ~500GB of storage space, and the associated bandwidth and processor/memory costs used in the dynamic generation/download of PDFs.

What happens when their internet fails? Or are they including redundant internet connectivity in their "cheap virtual hosting"?

I really can't see how you'd think a virtual hosted solution would be better suited or cheaper - I've looked at Rackspace, Linode, TSOHost and Memset, and all their offerings would be $100-500/month to provide the specification he's after.

And I haven't got a clue what you mean by: "Chances are they're a 9-5 company, so that's nearly 48 hours to get the system back up and running." - if they're a 9-5 company, and they fail at 5.30PM of a weekday, they'll have 15.5 hours to have the system operational again. If they fail during the day, or during the night (when no one is likely to notice without an appropriate system being implemented), it'll be costing them money immediately (or at the start of business when they come in to find everything is goosed).

£1500-2000 isn't a lot of money for the infrastructure to support a small business :confused:
 
ecksmen said:
For this sort of price point I'd look to get some cheap virtual hosting.
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Urm contradiction much. :p

I would agree that you could get a hosted VPS or something with better reliability than a cheapish server. What are your CPU requirements?

Will you be using the server for anything else? One at the office with a backup VPS could be a good choice.
 
slylittlefox said:
Eh? :confused: You're suggesting they use "cheap virtual hosting" to support a 'mission-critical' system? On top of which, they need ~500GB of storage space, and the associated bandwidth and processor/memory costs used in the dynamic generation/download of PDFs.

What happens when their internet fails? Or are they including redundant internet connectivity in their "cheap virtual hosting"?

I really can't see how you'd think a virtual hosted solution would be better suited or cheaper - I've looked at Rackspace, Linode, TSOHost and Memset, and all their offerings would be $100-500/month to provide the specification he's after.

And I haven't got a clue what you mean by: "Chances are they're a 9-5 company, so that's nearly 48 hours to get the system back up and running." - if they're a 9-5 company, and they fail at 5.30PM of a weekday, they'll have 15.5 hours to have the system operational again. If they fail during the day, or during the night (when no one is likely to notice without an appropriate system being implemented), it'll be costing them money immediately (or at the start of business when they come in to find everything is goosed).

£1500-2000 isn't a lot of money for the infrastructure to support a small business :confused:
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Bandwidth constraints is a valid point, for all we know they may have redundant high speed internet connection. It's currently a unknown but I doubt its redundant nor high speed. However they mentioned Cloud first of all so its possible. If the PDFs are created on the server, and sent out from the datacenter is bandwidth an issue, perhaps not.

For your outlay of 1.5K of a 9-5 business (8 hours working day * 2 = 16 hours). So, if you went for a say a single server you could offset the potential downtime of that single server versus the 2 days work your solution would cost. Working out the cost of the equipment vesus what you would loose was my point, but explained poorly. Plus you're fully supporting it yourself.


Based on the fact that the hardware will age, will require maintenance, configuration I'd opt for an outsourced solution where none of this is your concern.
 
i know a place where you can get very decent VPS, for avery good price with 100% SLA unless ofcourse there is scheduled maintenance, email me in trust for info. As it could possibly count as advertising
 
Perhaps I should step in at this point and just lay out a few facts: :)

Basically it is my company and we make personalised products.

These are made by customers logging on, creating their products, and then paying.

We then create the templates for the products on the fly using Image Magick and a bunch of other libs.

Currently we do all processing overnight on a virtual server. However, this creates a problem in that we have hundreds of megabytes of data to download to the fulfillment shop every morning. We also then do a late- morning run again for last minute orders, and again this can run into the hundreds of megabytes.

So, we need to site servers in the fulfilment shop, and do all the template production on-site by tapping into the sales DB. This is why I am looking at a pair of cheap servers. As a backup, we would then have the process hosted on a virtual server offsite somewhere and run it in emergencies (Like if the data link from the servers to the central DB is down, or the servers die or something).

If we lost the servers and were unable to process one run that day, we would probably lose about £100 of profits. If we then miss more runs, this is going to multiply. The more critical thing is that a lot of our orders are processed just-in-time (i.e. the day they need to be dispatched), so we will really be screwed if we can't process runs at all.

Thanks
 
In that case, I would probably go with something like a HP DL360, with redundant PSU, 8 x 146Gb discs, add an LTO 3 or 4 drive for night backups.

Now I know that is not entry level as such, but it is good reliable kit and has enough bits in it so if one part fails it will not take down your systems.

Kimbie
 
A couple of ML110s, with a couple of drives in Raid 1 for each.

Can be done for less than £500, will do what you want just fine, and with a bit of clever setup you could one automatically fallover to the other in the event of a failure.
 
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