DO I really need the expensive server board?

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BG250

I'm considering building or purchasing a new server. The server's function
will be a file server (300 GB fault tolerant SCSI RAID), will serve three
printers and will have the Pervasive SQL engine loaded for some accounting
software.

Our current server is a Dell Power Edge 4300 with dual 550Mhz Intel cpus. I
need to replace the server because it will be 5 years old and the extended
coverage will cease. The 100bps network strains under the load of the heavy
file I/O and the drives are filing up. However, the CPUs is with utilization
near 0 most of the time as the SCSI RAID controller handles the disk I/O.

I'm considering going with a good workstation mother board with a single,
but fast CPU and a RAID board, Gigabit Ehternet card and switch and perhaps
an external driver tower.

What do you think? bg
 
For optimal SCSI Raid performance, a 64-bit PCI slot is required and those
usually are available on server boards only. If you plan on using a Gigabit
Ehternet card, it would also perform better in a 64-bit slot.
 
BG250 said:
I'm considering building or purchasing a new server. The server's function
will be a file server (300 GB fault tolerant SCSI RAID), will serve three
printers and will have the Pervasive SQL engine loaded for some accounting
software.

Our current server is a Dell Power Edge 4300 with dual 550Mhz Intel cpus. I
need to replace the server because it will be 5 years old and the extended
coverage will cease. The 100bps network strains under the load of the heavy
file I/O and the drives are filing up. However, the CPUs is with utilization
near 0 most of the time as the SCSI RAID controller handles the disk I/O.

I'm considering going with a good workstation mother board with a single,
but fast CPU and a RAID board, Gigabit Ehternet card and switch and perhaps
an external driver tower.

What do you think? bg
Click to expand...
The problem is PCI performance.
Remember that the standard PCI bus is 'nominally' 133MB/sec, and will be
lucky to actually do 100MB/sec. Now a Gigabit ethernet card _on it's own_,
can fill this. Similarly a fast RAID adapter, will easily surpass this
figure. Hence the bus will bottleneck the system, unless you have a
motherboard that supports preferably 66MHz/64bit PCI. Some motherboards also
implement multiple busses, with some slots on one PCI bus, and others on a
seperate bus.
Guess what, it is generally server boards that support these features!...

Best Wishes
 
You don't necessarily need a server board, but you probably will want one
with 64-bit PCI (PCI-X) support, and many of those are server boards..
 
I'm considering building or purchasing a new server. The server's function
will be a file server (300 GB fault tolerant SCSI RAID), will serve three
printers and will have the Pervasive SQL engine loaded for some accounting
software.

Our current server is a Dell Power Edge 4300 with dual 550Mhz Intel cpus. I
need to replace the server because it will be 5 years old and the extended
coverage will cease. The 100bps network strains under the load of the heavy
file I/O and the drives are filing up. However, the CPUs is with utilization
near 0 most of the time as the SCSI RAID controller handles the disk I/O.

I'm considering going with a good workstation mother board with a single,
but fast CPU and a RAID board, Gigabit Ehternet card and switch and perhaps
an external driver tower.

What do you think? bg
Click to expand...

If you want to go cheap, consider the Dell Dimension 650 Dual Xeon
system with 2GB of ram or more. Bought 5 last month for $6000 each.

You could also consider building your own using the ASUS PC-DL board,
dual Xeon chips and mirrored 250GB SATA drives. Bought one last week at
a local store for $1500.

I just installed 5 650's today with dual 73GB SCSI drives in a simple
mirror running Windows 2000 Server and they scream - HT is enabled.

If you are running a database you really need to consider putting the
transaction logs on a mirror and the data on a raid 5 array set.
 
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