Purchasing a server

[Mahoney]

Hi all,

I'm looking at buying (or building) a cheap server. Objective is that it runs Windows Small Business Server 2003 (so I get my own Exchange server), Tomcat 5.0 and Apache 2.0 (so I can mess around with J2EE stuff) and of course SageTV Server (hopefully with one of the dual DVB-T cards that are about to be released, my existing PVR-500 and a DVB-S card).

My feeling is that it doesn't need to be very powerful at all (I guess at max it might be streaming video to one client whilst recording a couple of shows and letting me get at my mail). The odds of me serving to more than say 3 people at once via Tomcat/Apache are minimal.

However, and it's a big however, I want it to be seriously expandable in terms of storage capacity. I really want 8 SATA ports running RAID 5. To begin with I'll just(!) stick 3 300GB drives in, but with RAID only being able to use the capacity of the smallest drive I want to know that I can keep adding up to 2.1TB. I can see that much space being used over the years.

There are currently a bunch of motherboards on the market with 8 SATA ports - but they all seem to have them over 2 separate controllers. Can you still set up RAID 5 with them? If not, does anyone have a recommendation for a controller card? Most of the controller cards seem to be PCI-X, which is understandable but a pain as I don't want to be tied to "server" motherboards.

Any advice/thoughts gratefully received.

[bluenote]

Hi Mahoney

Please, please, do yourself a favor and use hardware raid. Preferably a standalone card and not a motherboard function.

Just my opinion for what it is worth.

Cory

[Mahoney]

Another thing I've been reading about is software RAID, which I think would work with the 8 ports over two controllers - see here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041119/index.html

However, that article doesn't make it clear to me whether extra drives can be added at a later date (though surely they can?), nor what kind of processing power I would need to make it workable (though I'd have thought a modern machine, however cheap, ought to be up to it given the very low workload I'm planning on giving it otherwise.)

[Mahoney]

Wrote that last before cnovak posted! OK, so which hardware RAID card should I be looking at? Money is an issue; I'm alredy resenting the thought of having to pay out for Windows Server 2003 Small Business Edition just to run Exchange, and considering how little I want this thing to do I'd like it to be very cheap.

[dagar]

on a side note, good gawd, why E2k3? Exchange is the devil

on the cheap you can usually find deals on Dull Powersledge 420SC boxes

[Mahoney]

Well, I'd really like all the features of an Exchange account - email integrated with calendar, contacts, tasks, shared calendars with my wife so we can avoid double booking; that sort of thing. And I'd like it to work seamlessly with Outlook as a thick client (because I've yet to find anything better than Outlook), and have a fully featured web interface for when Outlook is unavailable.

I want it to be under my control because all of the companies out there offering Exchange accounts at a monthly rate have some limitation or other that is unacceptable to me; and since I want to run SageTV Server on the box with a bunch of capture cards the box will almost certainly have to be a Windows one for driver reasons (possibly for SageTV reasons; I don't know how much native code there is in there that would prevent the SageTV service running under Linux).

So as far as I can see that leaves me with a choice of Exchange, Exchange or Exchange. I've explored the possibility of installing Open-Xchange (which is Java based) on Windows, but from the forums I'd be the first to attempt it and comments on the idea didn't sound positive! Besides, I've already tried to get it running under Linux and gave up = not enough time to work through the issues. I'm just not experienced enough with Linux, for me it's still (very) hard work (and as I say, I want to run SageTV Server on the box).

[Mahoney]

Thanks for the pointer to the Dell servers; they may well be what I'm looking for. Unfortunately the cheap ones only seem to permit 4 SATA drives to be connected, which is a shame.

[dbfresh23]

If you will be taking the good advice of using a hardware raid instead of software then the number of onboard SATA connectors is irrelevant. The hardware raid card will have it's own SATA connections.

[Mahoney]

If you will be taking the good advice of using a hardware raid instead of software then the number of onboard SATA connectors is irrelevant. The hardware raid card will have it's own SATA connections.

In the case of the Dell servers they suggest that you can only connect 4 to the RAID controller. I'm still struggling to find an 8 port PCI (or PCI-e) hardware raid controller.