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What server do we purchase?

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by m_supinski

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I work for a large company and we are looking to purchase a small server to use for our internal department. We would like to use it to host a couple of smaller applications accessed by about 10-20 users. I use Microsoft Access extensively as well as SQL. We would want the server to support a couple of homegrown tools. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm flying blind as I am more of a data miner than IT professional.
THANKS!

3 replies

by rahouseholder

Talk to your company's IT department. Since they should be the ones supporting it and you will need their permission to add it to the network, they can recommend what to purchase and probably even get you a discount by using their vendors.

by churdoo

You'll get responses of everything from HP to Dell to build your own, and everything in between.

If you work for a large company, then they may already have their own server standards, and probably a name brand like HP or Dell. HP is my vote, by the way. But why can't you ask your corporate IT for help? I KNOW they'll want to control everything and host it in their datacenter, but if you insist this is strictly development and/or pre-production work and you need direct access and control of the server, then they should finally concede and help you out.

Also, if this is a lab or a development function, then consider virtualization where you can create virtual machines for a given project or function and if it doesn't work out, re-provision a new one.

And you'll need to decide some other things before selecting the server: like O/S or O/S'es (I assume Windows Server 2003 or 2008 since you mentioned MS Access, and by SQL did you mean MS SQL Server?); what about disk subsystem, i.e. RAID, hot-swap, disk capacities?; and of course the all-important question, budget?!?; Do you have a server cabinet to put this in or will it be tower server(s)?; Is this a development server running only dev and pre-production apps or will it be hosting production apps?

So having said all of that, I'll forego suggesting a server (minimum HP ML350 G5 tower or HP DL380 G5 rackmount w/2x 72GB SAS plus 4x 146GB SAS, oops were my fingers typing?).

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