| | | | | capacity hard disk with maximum rpm and |
| Servers are in demand from university to large | | | | throughput, and that too in large numbers. You |
| enterprise business. However, knowing that you | | | | can actually get better performance out of five |
| need a server and actually getting the right one | | | | 10,000 rpm SATA HDDs than what you can get |
| are two different things. This how-to guide will | | | | from two 15,000 rpm SAS drives. But it depends |
| help you understand what a server is, how to | | | | on how much you can spend and what's more |
| decide if you need one, and how to go about | | | | important for you. If redundancy is not important |
| finding the right server to meet your needs. | | | | and you have three HDDs, then you can connect |
| | | | | all of them in RAID 0 (Stripping mode) and get |
| (1) What problem are you trying to solve? | | | | some really extraordinary performance. |
| (2) What kind of software do you need to run | | | | Now, if redundancy is extremely important, which |
| on system? | | | | is the case with most users, you can go for |
| (3) How many processors do you need and at | | | | RAID 5 with more hard disks (let's say 6 instead |
| what speed? | | | | of 3) so that you can reduce the performance |
| (4) How much memory (RAM) do you need? | | | | degradation while writing parity information, and |
| When choosing a hardware configuration, | | | | get performance which is equivalent to having |
| remember that each application has a different | | | | two disks in RAID 0. |
| requirement. For instance, if you plan to use your | | | | |
| server as a Web Server with a lot of static | | | | (6) What kind of hard disk controller (SATA, |
| content (such as a Web portal) or as a file or | | | | SCSI, or SAS) do you need? |
| networked server, then the amount of RAM | | | | (7) Do you want a rackmount server or a |
| doesn't really matter. | | | | tower? |
| (5) How much hard disk space does data | | | | (8) How many network interface cards do you |
| require, now and in the future? | | | | need? |
| Your Hard disk capacity based on future | | | | (9) Do you plan to attach additional backup and |
| requirement and on data you have to store. | | | | storage drives (tape or optical, for example) to |
| Another important parameter for I/O intensive | | | | your system? |
| networked servers is hard disk performance. This | | | | (10) What level of RAID (redundant array of |
| is also critical for database servers. But to get | | | | independent disks) do you want to support? |
| optimum performance, you require a very high | | | | These questions help you to choose best servers. |