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One IT Pro's Guide to Building a SMP ServerNov 01 '00 Write an essay on this topic.There are many things to consider when building your own computer, and then there are many more when it is going to be the main or only server your company has. As I am the only technical person in a 50-person company, it fell on me to design, build, and implement a server. The considerations I faced included: Cost, reliability, upgradeability, projected server workload, operating system, which Network Interface Card (NIC) or cards to use, backwards compatibility with our current software, and how to include the only tape drive we had available at the time, which was an old SCSI-1 (10Mb/s) DAT drive with 2 GB capacity. Keep in mind this was March 1999. Consideration 1: COST A fixed budget meant it had to fit under $3,000 or so, which dictated I build it myself. (I had to save some to upgrade the PC's to modern standards and network hubs to 100 Base-T at the same time.) If necessary I could have spent more, but the more I saved, the less I.T. budget I'd have for that quarter.. Consideration 2: RELIABILITY The only or primary server on a network HAS to be reliable, meaning I had to mostly buy name-brand or well-proven components when I could, especially for the motherboard, processors, and Hard Drives. I was aiming for 3 9's reliability, and ended up at .99885 so far for FY2000. (10 hours total downtime this year; I'll explain later. We have had the server up now for 210 days continuously as of Nov.1, 2000.) Consideration 3: UPGRADEABILITY To make it easier to upgrade this server, it must have extra room in the case, a large enough power supply, have plenty of available PCI slots, and be easily accessible inside. Consideration 4: PROJECTED SERVER WORKLOAD/SPEED At the time this server was built, we had 14 PC workstations all with Pentium 100 CPUs or slower. Some were even diskless, booted through a floppy boot disk pointing to a network share. The future held a doubling of employees, A LOT of OLDER pc'S TO BE UPGRADED/REPLACED, and a lot of Ethernet traffic over the wires. Thus, the network workload was expected to quadruple very soon. Plus future capacity had to be planned for also. This pretty much dictated Symmetrical Multi Processing (SMP). Consideration 4: OPERATING SYSTEM At the time we had a Novell Netware 4 server with 15 licenses. To save money out of a separate budget, I elected to just upgrade to 25 licenses and leave Netware 5, was was just released a month prior to this. Microsoft Windows 2000 was almost a year away. Consideration 5: NETWORK INTERFACE CARD/S These had to be 100 Base-t or faster. Gigabit Ethernet was not standardized yet, and luckliy we had Category 5 cable already laid out. Only question left: How many and made by what company? Consideration 6: BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY We had certain programs and hardware we needed to keep using, these being Microsoft Foxpro for DOS, (there goes WIN NT 4.0), and an old SCSI-1 DAT tape drive of 2GB capacity. These considerations led me to the following choices: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CASE: Full Tower ATX Form--- Generic brand. It had a 250 Watt Power supply, which I upgraded to 300 Watts. Cost $70 MOTHERBOARD: Asus P2B-DS Dual CPU ATX MB with on-board UW SCSI-2 and 5 PCI slots, an AGP slot, and 2 ISA slots. Has the capacity to hold 1GB os RAM and 100 Megahertz bus speed, with 256MB PC100 SDRAM. Cost $459 PROCESSOR(s): At the time the fastest CPU available was the Intel Pentium II 450, so to reduce cost I went with Dual PII 400's. Cost $420 ($210 each). HARD DRIVE(s): At that time 18GB UW SCSI-2 were just coming out at $600 each, so I went one step down to twin IBM Deskstar 9GB UW SCSI-2 LVD drives rated at 80MB/s). In early 2000 this was supplemented with a Western Digital Enterprise 9GB UW SCSI-2 LVD drive. Cost $620 ($310 each). FLOPPY DRIVE; still gotta have one.... Generic Cost $18. CD-ROM DRIVE: Generic 24x CD-ROM Cost $40. NETWORK CARDS: Bus-mastering, "intelligent" were supposed to be the best available, so I played it safe and bought two Intel Pro 100+ full-duplex cards. In early 2000 this was increased to 3. Cost $200. OPERATING SYSTEM: Upgraded existing Netware 4 license from 15 to 25. Cost $1400. Not included in overall price. VIDEO CARD: I used an existed S3 Virge PCI card since NW4.11 did not support AGP at the time. MONITOR: I used an existing 15" monitor. Cables/Fans/Keyboard/Mouse cost an extra $30 or so. Total price was $1857 plus tax, bringing the total to $1968.42. For under two grand we got a server that has only been taken down twice for Service Pack installs, had one unexpected software crash resolved by installing Service Pack 8, and one catastrophic hard drive crash early in Feb. 2000. (See my review on Seagate Scorpion for details at "http://www.epinions.com/enth-review-587B-E402F3-39EF4F93-prod1". All in all the decision process took longer than building it did. Standard parts all fit well together, and the first POST test was such a relief to see the "roll call" as Autoexec.exe and Config.sys were run. We have also added 256MB more of memory to bring it to 512 MB. We added a Seagate Scorpion 20/40 Tape Drive in early 2000. It specs out like this: (2) PII 400's 512 MB PC100 SDRAM (3) 9GB SCSI-2 UW LVD HD's (each at 40/80 mbps sustained) (3) 10/100 Base-T NIC's S3 Virge PCI Video w/4MB 15" MONITOR. Seagate Scorpion 20/40 Tape Drive SCSI-2 UW (40mbps) Compare this to the previous legancy server it replaced. (1) Pentium 75 128 MB 60ns SIMMs (2) 2GB SCSI-1 (10 mbps) 1 10Base-T NIC 1 MB ISA Video Card 14" Monochrome monitor. 2/4 GB SCSI-1 (10mbps) All this led to me having to build 15 more PC's for my company. Building the same server in late 2000 would force different choices. The CPU's would be either PIII 733 or higher (or I would wait for P4's to be shipped later this year..). Memory would be 512MB of PC133 or DDR RAM, probably not RDRAM. Hard drives would be at least 3 10,000 rpm UW SCSI-2 at 18GB or higher each, probably in a RAID array. Everything else is still current...cannot afford Gigabit Ethernet over copper yet :) Update: My parent company was purchased by a company with 1 Billion in revenues last night, so my budget may either skyrocket, or it may not matter to me anymore...  |
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