Raid Server

From Initq

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Case 3 Capacity 4 OS Drives 5 Hot Swap 6 Storage Drives 7 Power Supply 8 Memory 9 Cables 10 Network Cards 11 Video 12 OS 13 Raid Hardware

Introduction

These servers are either made for home or work. In the home based servers we try to limit the spending and keep the cost low but still the quality of work and product is high. The work servers use high end raid cards and the case is also rack mountable which increases the cost.

Case

We use Armor Cases for our home servers and Supermicro for office environments.

Capacity

The capacity all depends on the user and how much they want to spend. We normally make 1.2 terabyte servers for home and 2 to 7 terabyte servers for work.

OS Drives

We use 160 gig to 500 gig OS drives for the main operating system. Not all of it is needed but we compile our own kernels and sometimes compile our own applications. To accommodate the source code and multiple compilations of utilities, we need the extra space. We use software raid for home users and hardware raid for work environments.

Hot Swap

All our drives are installed with hot swap bays so drive replacement is quite easy.

Storage Drives

We use 500-750-1000 gig drives for storage, depending on what capacity the user needs.

Power Supply

In order to power all the drives we need 550 watt power supply for home servers and 750 for all work servers.

Memory

Memory is most important for storage servers so we use no less than 4 gig memory on all our servers.

Cables

We use all round cables for our PATA drives and SATA cables for serial drives.

Network Cards

We use two network cards in all our servers, for internal network and external network. Internal network is used to back the server to an identical server and not interfere with external traffic.

Video

Video is something we do not case about because we normally don't install any gui type environment. All our utilities are console based and the server can be accessed via ssh from any other network computer. We also realize that there will always be occasions where you will need to directly connect to the server so we install the most inexpensive video card we can find.

OS

We use debian as our main OS. It all depends on the customer what flavor of Linux they prefer. We do not do Windows.

Raid Hardware

For home servers we used Highpoint cards but we are moving away from high point and only using 3ware cards from here on. We have always used 3ware cards for our work environment.