Server upgrade time

[Daredevil]

Hi all

First post here but this looks like a pretty good community.

Around Christmas this year I get to upgrade our main file server and I was looking for some advice on what sort of hardware to look at. Bear in mind this needs to last us 3 years. Currently it's a dual P3 1.133GHz with 896Mb of RAM and an HP NC7141 Gigabit NIC. Hard drive space isn't much of an issue as the existing server has a 260Gb external RAID array hooked up to a Compaq 5200 Smart Array card which will go into the new server.

The server is the DC for our Active Directory tree and has over 800 users. It hosts over 100Gb of shared files, 27 print queues, is a dhcp server and runs licensing services for 2 network aware apps. It has approx 300 workstations that logon to it.

I jokingly suggested we should go quad Xeon with 2Gb of memory and was told if that's what I thought we needed that's what I'd get. I suppose the question is should I stick with dual processor or go quad, and should I go Xeon, Opteron or Itanium?

I also have to decide whether to stick with Windows 2000 server or go up to 2003, but that's an entirely different discussion.

[andsome]

WELCOME!

[Agent Smith]

Hi Daredevil, and welcome to the Forum.

First off, I have to say you are a lucky ***** :D :P Coming from NZ, home page is for Rugby Refs and you have a company who tell you they will spend whatever you think is right!! :o How do I get to emigrate?? :D

Now for the serious question. It's great that you are planning ahead, but Xmas is 5 months away, and by then there will probably have been quite a lot of changes as to what is available for you to get. I would suggest waiting till nearer the time, then seeing what the big players (Dell, HP, Compaq etc) are offering and then play them off against each other. It is amazing what sort of deals can be squeezed from these people :whistling:

I would definately recommend putting in as much memory as you can though, I think you will see more benefit from this, than simply ramping your processors. It is cheap enough at the moment (as an example, today we ordered another 1Gb for an older box from Dell for £140.00), so I would go for 3 or 4 Gb.

I don't think that in reality you will need to go to a quad machine (bear in mind that Xeons hyperthread, so a pair can be set to run as quads anyway), but if you can get the money, then perhaps you should consider it B) As for processor type, I really would wait till later and see what is available and how any other software you wish to run pans out.

Finally, as the machine would be expected to last for at least 3 years, I think you would have to give serious consideration to running W2k3, the last thing you would want is for support for 2k to be withdrawn during the lifespan of your server.

Have you considered using the old server simply for the printers? It should be more than happy running those, would take some overhead off the primary server and could still act as a secondary DC.

I dare say this post will cause some discussion, so lets see how it pans out.

Regards. Mr. Mouse.

[Daredevil]

Thanks for the quick reply. I just thought I should probably add that as we lease all of our equipment here the old server won't be in production post migration.