New Server Help

fuzed

fuzed

fuzed

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16 Jul 2004
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145
Guys, I need a server/tower for the office.

We currently have an old i7 tower unit which is hosting an application which allows users third party access to their data. The data is held on external 3.5" hard drives in caddies - not the best solution, but it works - we currently have 3 caddies - with 9 hard drives plugged into them, this can increase dependant on client requirements.

I know nothing about server setups - I was looing into a rackmount setup - but we don't have a rack to be able to put it into so I want another tower.

I'm looking at possibly a ryzen/threadripper setup.

Processing of the data can take some time and can take a lot of resources, which need to be done on this box so it needs a good amount of RAM and fast hard drives (possibly due processing on SSD's then move the data).

Thoughts on what I should price up?

I know its a very open ended question but I have NO idea about server setups.
If I built the server and then got a number of large hard drives internally I guess I could copy the data over - however this is a live system so downtime means upset customers.

I would prefer to build the new machine, install all the software and then swap.
 
Thank you for your reply.

It'll be a tower as I don't have any space in the rack.
Its a web based eDiscovery App server that hosts data for the users. The users connect in using a web browser to access their data. I also use this box to process data so it needs some grunt, the users can run queries on their data, like searches etc, everything is Java based.

I'm thinking of going with a Ryzen or Threadripper, but was wondering if the Ryzen processors would support 128GB of RAM?

I only ask as I've had times where lots of processing has been very CPU and RAM intensive, due to massive data sets of around 150GB.
 
Thanks for your input - sadly can't go on the cloud due to the type of data we host.

I'm looking at going with a RAID setup, and possibly having a few days down time whilst data is copied over to the new setup - I'll be going with a 5950x setup with 128GB of ram. We don't need Thread ripper pro or EPYC setups due to the the server not being utilised to that extend - it'll only be used by 10-15 people at a time using the web end and that's on a busy day. Most days we see 2-3 people utilising it.

And yes thank you for the advise I think the best action is to advise the customers of the impending upgrades and advise of downtime whilst this takes place.

I do need to look at fail over/distributed capacity - anyone have any thoughts on this - how this might be achieved, if you have any links that I can spend some time reading it would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks Quartz, very helpful. I may just discuss the option of having a cold spare - sat in the box and just create an image of the main system drive on a weekly basis - System drive only holds some data - the customer data is on the other drives.

Yes that is the issue were a small company so costs are limited - i.e. I can spend so much, but not 20/30K as that wouldn't be possible with the budgets we have. I can probably get away with spending £5-6K for two systems.
 
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