Will this server be enough for these services?

Mittens · 21 Apr 2017 at 16:51

Hi everyone.

I am doing a uni project and am tasked with speccing a small startup (imaginary) company a server.
The company will have a maximum of 50 employees.

the server will run DHCP, Active Directory, Domain Naming System, IIS, RADIUS.

Would this do the job do you think or is it slicing the loaf too thin ? am not quite sure how to evaluate it .

HPE ProLiant DL160 Gen9 Xeon E5-2609V4 1.7 GHz 16GB RAM 1U Rack Server.

thank you.

LizardKing · 21 Apr 2017 at 17:09

Easily, there all pretty light services to say the least (though iis is variable on what its serving mind). are they expecting redundancy as well?
Personally i'd never spec a single server solution.

d_brennen · 21 Apr 2017 at 17:09

Depends what this startup does I guess. For reference I've two ProLiant DL380s with Xeon E5-2640v2 2GHz (8c16t x2) with 128GB RAM using ESXi. Our server 1 is hosting similar services for ~1500 users, and we have 5/6 virtual servers per 380. In this case it's an school so pretty light requirements

I'd say it'll work fine. What storage configuration?

Mittens · 21 Apr 2017 at 17:32

first of all, thank you so much for your replies.

I 'purchased' a HPE 1.2TB 12G 10k rpm HPL SAS SFF 2.5in SC ENT 3 Year Wty Hard Drive for the server along with a HPE MSL2024 0-Drive Tape Library and 10 tapes so we can rotate them . these will be used for things like user configurations etc and to give us some redundancy. it will be connected to a APC Smart-UPS X 1500 Rack/Tower LCD - UPS - 1200 Watt - 1500 VA system but atm we have no backup server. my problem is Im not sure how to do the write up to justify the selection. If I were choosing a home pc Id know what I wanted to run -- games, vm's , ms office etc and could look at benchmarks but when it comes to enterprise stuff Im completely in the dark and dont know how to evaluate it. if anyone could help along these lines so I sound marginally intelligent I would appreciate it.

ooops forgot to mention. its for 4 separate companys sharing an 'incubation' unit .. -- they will do web design, games design, music production and video production.

d_brennen · 21 Apr 2017 at 17:40

"A" HPE 1.2TB 12G 10k rpm drive? That's worrying

I've swapped out 2 predicted drive failures from our StorageWorks SAN this year alone (24 disk)

d_brennen · 21 Apr 2017 at 17:41

Double post

gman1981 · 21 Apr 2017 at 18:41

Echo the concern around 1 hard drive. Consider RAID5, 6 or 10 for disk redundancy. Also tape drives I'm not convinced by cost wise. You could look at some sort cloud backup software (which has the added bonus of being offsite)

Mittens · 21 Apr 2017 at 18:55

thanks guys, have added more HDD's to the budget and will recommend your suggestion for RAID. thank you all

Caged · 21 Apr 2017 at 19:51

Why is that a uni project?

GDL · 21 Apr 2017 at 20:55

Mittens said:
HPE MSL2024 0-Drive Tape Library and 10 tapes so we can rotate them.

Make sure that you get a drive with that and that the tapes are of the same LTO version or one generation lower. (LTO4 drives can write to LTO3 and read LTO2)

2nd, you're going to need another server depending on the connection of that MSL and other hardware on the estate unless you plan on using hardware passthrough* for the HBA to connect it to a VM which is OK on Server 2012R2 and twitchy at best on 2008R2.

*I've only done it on Hyper-V not VMWare so it might be a lot simpler on that hypervisor,

Mittens · 21 Apr 2017 at 21:55

Caged said:
Why is that a uni project?

its for professional skills which encompasses things like business practices, ethics, data protection, risk assessments, safe harbour and generally tries to teach us to look at things in a way that business does (read "accountants") rather than just the tech side.

Caged · 21 Apr 2017 at 22:24

I just can't help but feel that it's a bit dated. Being given the scenario of a startup and the course leading you towards buying a single tower server to run some Windows roles on is getting you to think probably close to ten years in the past. Likewise tapes for a primary backup target. This is the sort of stuff that people would be surprised to hear if you were ripping it out today because they'd wonder why it lasted so long.

Your brief sounds like you're being asked about infrastructure for a co-working type of space, but you haven't addressed probably the biggest issue which is keeping the data of the four companies completely separate from each other - instead you're getting bogged down by HP part numbers and exact server specs when it's not really relevant. For companies of that size (less than 15 staff each) with no legacy baggage on them I think you'd be crazy to do anything other than spend as much money as you can bear on a fat Internet pipe / internal networking infrastructure with resiliency at each level, and treat on-premises deployments of anything as an exception that needs to be justified, rather than the default. This instantly gives you business continuity without really having to think about it, enables remote work etc etc.

Syngress · 21 Apr 2017 at 22:26

How about hosting on something like AWS or Azure?

That way it's an opex rather than a capex cost. Could help with a fictional startups cash flow

blueboy2001 · 21 Apr 2017 at 22:31

That tape library doesn't have any drives. A drive will cost more than the library. LTO 7 is very expensive, LTO 6 is the sweet spot these days. If you don't need multiple tapes each day you could just get a drive in a rack mount enclosure.

Mittens · 22 Apr 2017 at 12:15

all points noted. thank you for the input guys its all useful stuff.

Hellsmk2 · 25 Apr 2017 at 14:15

Have you been set an imaginary budget?

El Pew · 26 Apr 2017 at 10:44

Syngress said:
How about hosting on something like AWS or Azure?

That way it's an opex rather than a capex cost. Could help with a fictional startups cash flow

Yeah, this. Assuming this is a paper project and you're not actually going to be buying the damn thing, you can do all of the required services on Azure and it will be a) cheaper to start up, b) lighter on skills since you don't need anyone with hardware experience to manage the tin and c) easier to manage the complicated stuff like backup and resilience, it's taken care of for you.

Plus, it scales with your business, so as it grows, the cloud estate grows with you.

d_brennen · 26 Apr 2017 at 10:50

In the real world it would cost an arm and a leg, however upfront capital expense is £0

khrall · 1 May 2017 at 15:22

Spec of the server is fine for running those but consider (hypothetically of course):-

Redundancy - What is the impact to the imaginary business if the server is offline for several hours/days. Would it be wise to add a second server for resilience?
Is IIS for an internal or external facing site - I wouldn't want external public connections on my Domain Controller.
More than 1 drive required! Separation of OS/DATA - Consider RAID 1 for OS and RAID 5/6/10 for Data. - How much data will this company have/generate?
MSL2024 is overkill a StoreEver 1/8 G2 would suffice, it's a single server your backing up.
You mention 10 tapes - do you have any regulatory/audit requirements to keep data for an extended amount of time? GFS rotations?
Is there a budget associated to this imaginary project?

If looking virtualisation, then there are a whole load more things to consider, but I suspect this would be going off track and way overkill for the scope of this.