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