Suggest A New Spec For a Novatech Server

[Nox]

Thats exactly why i think if anything is thought about, a home server type affair, with a 'push button' backup onto an external hard drive or something would be the best idea, semi low power, cheap as chips, big enought storage for backing up your DVD/CD collection. Has to be easy, significantly better than a NAS, and cost effective and more importantly, able to stream stuff out to xbox/vista etc, work for a family.

But... I don't know what the demand would be like, very low probably.

Nox

[wonder_lander]

This is the thing though. A lot of manufacturers Dell / HP etc often do deals on their lowest spec servers which make an excellent base to build from.

HP have a dedicated windows home server box that thye sell, you could try and match that spec for a lower price and include things like an external harddrive or cross sell services like Mozy or Skydrive which give you web based backup.

[jonbanjo]

Again, I suppose the question is what is a server? I have 2.

#1 Web server running Apache, MySQL, php, etc. on Linux for a small low usage (Dec stats say we served 1235094KB) site but perhaps (which is why I host this at home) unusual in that it does run some other executables to produce "sheet music" (pdf and png) and midi from plain (abc) text on the fly via programs including ghostscript.

#2 Media server running MythTV on Linux. 3 (well one is a twin tuner) dvb tuners, capable of recording 3 progams simultaniously as well as allowing TV viewing, ogg/mp3 sharing, etc. in 3 locations in the house.

Both boxes work (web got upgraded following a breakdown but I keep original as a spare and a taker of backups) happily on AMD 3000, 1GB Ram, SATA (750MB in the media server) drives, etc.

From that POV, any current entry level PC can be a practical server. Not the answer for this thread, I'm sure but perhaps could be used as "what you could do with another PC" in the home. Not counting the "spare", we have 4 (the last 2 being Novatech barebones builds and I think another (currently AMD XP2000) shortly to go that way).

[Juillen]

Really all depends on what you want the server to do.
High read/low write file server would be a couple of GB RAM, a quad core CPU (at most), and a large RAID 5/RAID6 array with a fair bit of cache. Get a NIC that has TCP offload to make sure that the net load doesn't impact the CPU too much, and you'll have a winner.
Separate partition for OS/Pagefile (RAID 1) to ensure it doesn't get in the way of the main files.
App servers and database servers are different beasties; you need to consider a lot of options (what RAM does the app need to prevent paging, how much CPU will it chew through to give good service, what type of IO patterns do you have for different areas, are you going to need redundant PSUs? So on, so forth..
It's an entertaining art speccing servers (realistically, Intel for raw power these days; AMD used to have the corner on memory throughput, but the latest Intel processors have caught up with that in the main).

[AvanceIT]

Hi Amy,

I'd like to see a range of servers specifically for virtualisation.
We've had two custom built servers from you now for large virtualisation projects which we have undertaken for clients and it would be great if you had a range of preconfigured servers ready off the shelf.

If you would like to get an idea of the specification we use then have a chat with Jason Dance as he has managed getting the servers built for us.

Merry Christmas!

Mike.
Director.
AvanceIT Ltd.

As the title suggests, we want your input!!
Use this thread to suggest what specs you would like to see in our Novatech Server Range... who knows, we might even stock one!
Have Fun!
Amy