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Windows Server Data Center

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Shifting Brand Loyalty

As data center development has changed over the past couple of decades, brand loyalty has also shifted. Up until recently, IBM was the number one IT vendor in the world, unmatched by any other brand in terms of sales numbers or revenue. However, just like everything in the IT world, things are changing.

HP has recently surpassed IBM in popularity. Now focused on the data center market, HP is getting ready to meet the increased demand that goes with producing data center servers. HP's popularity increase seems to know no bounds. In fact, some recent surveys show that over 40% of IT professionals prefer HP servers to any other brand.

About Servers

A server is the hub of a network, and it is a data center's responsibility to have a high quality server in order to maintain its business. Rather than processing power, purchasers of servers focus RAM and hard drive speed to handle the network traffic. Energy efficiency is also becoming a major concern in purchasing decisions.

What Makes a Good Server?

So what influences the server buying decisions of data center professionals? Choice of a server depends on many factors, including availability and price, but most IT professional find these qualities to be extremely important:

- Quality: IT professionals report that a good server has high quality parts, a major factor in server reliability. A server is arguably the most important part of a data center infrastructure, and data center business is very closely linked to reliability and a high level of availability. Having a server with high quality parts is of the utmost importance.

- Support: Similarly, IT professionals require their servers to have an excellent support team. If the server does go down for some reason, every moment matters in trying to repair it. Having a good support team on your side can be the difference between hours of server downtime and days or weeks of lost usage and revenue.

- Performance: Server performance is another important factor considered by IT professionals when buying servers for a data center. Often, IT professionals avoid server brands that have caused past problems for their data center. Negative reviews from other professionals also have an impact on performance-based buying decisions.

- Customization: Another important factor in choosing a server for a data center is the ability to customize the equipment to fit individual needs. Standard specifications may not be appropriate for all applications.

Future of Data Center Servers

With the current focus on environmental responsibility, data centers are making every attempt to go green. The amount of power used by a server may become more of a factor in purchasing decisions as energy costs rise. Server efficiency may soon be one of the top qualities IT professional prize in their server purchasing decisions.

In today's difficult economy, server power usage is likely to become a major issue. Many companies are struggling to shore up the bottom line, and more efficient servers help them reduce their operating budget. In addition, new environmental laws are likely to make the “greenness” of a server one of the main purchasing considerations.

Windows Server Data Center

Over the past few years, we at Technetium, Inc. have had the opportunity to deal with Snap because of our model 14000 Snap servers. One day we installed new managed switches and the Snap Web-based management console would no longer operate. It would just hang at gigabit speed. To make a long story short, after exhausting all of my options on the Internet, I sent Snap technical support an email to try and resolve the problem. Here is their response:

Your case, 000000000005476, was updated. Please refer to the information below for our response. Please Click here if you need additional support on this issue.

Please do not reply to this email as it will not be seen by a live representative.

Your Query:

I have 2 snap 12000s and they will not negotiate 1000tx to my Dell Powerconnect 5324 switch. I'm afraid to set the nic in debug to anything other than auto.

It also shows half duplex when the switch shows full duplex.

Thank you in advance,

Todd Foster

Our Response:

Good morning Todd.

Again this is not technical support. We can be reached on a pay-per-incident of $120.00 through our 2 numbers: 408-934-7274 and 321-207-2000.

Sincerely,

Adaptec Customer Service

To my dismay, they wanted $120 just to talk to me, and my bet is they wanted another $1,000 or so to upgrade the software. On their Website I could not find any way to buy support for this model any more. And by the way, to add replication between 2 of their Snap servers, it would cost something like $1,000 per box.

So, here we are, with 2 boxes, no support, and I'll bet that you can't even buy parts for it any more from Snap, much less anywhere else (maybe eBay?).

Off we go to buy new NAS replacements. Originally these 14000's were $10K apiece, for roughly 1TB of storage. All things being equal, I should be able to buy a NAS box for really cheap (yeah right!). What I found was that a high-quality NAS system that would do RAID 5 would cost between $3,500 and 4,500, not to mention that a 1TB Snap 520 would be over $5K. That is when we decided to build our own NAS servers!

With a great backround in PC/server hardware, it was easy for me to pick top-quality hardware and brand name components. I still have Pentium Pro servers that work! I chose the best hardware, put it in a rack mount server case, and voila! I have a NAS server. Here is the list of components:

* FreeNAS redone to work with the hardware that we provide

* Kingwin 4 in 3 Multi-Drive Bay SATA Internal Hot Swap Mobile Rack, w/ Key Lock, LED Indicator & Two 40mm Cooling Fans

* SONY Beige DDU1615 Internal EIDE 16X DVD-ROM Drive

* Enermax ELT500AWT 500W Power Supply

* 4U IPC-4071 Rackmount Chassis Server Case - Beige Color

* Transcend TS256MCF45I-D flash card

* 4 ea. Seagate(ST3500630NS)500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM 16MB Buff Hard drive

* Addonics ADSACFW CF to SATA adapter

* SUPERMICRO|MBD-PDSME+

* 3WARE 9650SE-4LPML SATAII RAID controller

* INTEL XEON 3060 775 2.4G 4M

* 1Gx2|Kingston DII667 KVR667D2N5K2/2G

We need an OS now, and for that I picked FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org) which runs on FreeBSD. You can't ask for a more stable operating system. And by the way, the FreeNAS OS runs from memory and boots from a CF card (no chance of the hard drive crashing and destroying the config). This custom built NAS system has turned out great, and our client is very pleased with the money we saved them.

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About Author

Both Amy Nut & Todd Foster are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Amy Nut has sinced written about articles on various topics from Credit Cards, Interview Questions and Careers and Job Hunting. provider operates a state of the art. Amy Nut's top article generates over 201000 views. to your Favourites.

Todd Foster has sinced written about articles on various topics from About Branding. Todd Foster is Senior Systems Architect at Technetium, Inc. which provides professional project consulting for Fortune 1000 companies.

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