Re: New Hardware and Setup Advice

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Personally myself seeing how you do plan on buying new hardware I would buy
one power server. Perhaps a dual processor and lots of RAM. I would also
make sure it comes with a RAID Controller. Preferably a dual channel one. I
would use 1 Channel for the OS RAID1 Mirrored set using 2-18GB HDD (if you
can still get them). I would use the other channel for a RAID5 striped set
using 3-4 HDD's and even more depending on how large you need it to be.
4-36GB's would give you approximately 108GB partiton. I would also consider
buying and extra 36GB drive for a hot spare. Having 210GB available I would
make 3 partitions.

D:\Exchange 20GB
F:\Program Files 10-20GB
G:\Data 60-70GB

Now you have Redundancy and fault tolerance so having to image the server
can be eliminated. You do use Backup Exec so you make sure you back up the
System State for diasaster recovery.


"Richard Wagstaff" <rwagstaff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23V1jO4KgGHA.3860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We are a small family-owned company who are about to move into a new
location and I'm looking to start from scratch. The problem is that we
don't have the budget to bring in outside experts and I'm certainly no
expert (although I've been watching over our current SBS 2003 network for
some years).

These are my thoughts as to how to proceed and I'd be really grateful if
some kind should could give me their thoughts.

Currently our server (SBS 2003 Standard) has only two HDD's. Disk 0 is
split into C & D - C has the operating system and D has Exchange. Drive 1
has the data. We back up Drive 1 & Exchange every day using Backup Exec
10 (SBS) and each week an image is taken on C & D using Powerquest's V2i
Protector.

We have 8 workstations all running XP Pro SP2

My thoughts are to buy two identical servers (something like Dell's
Poweredge 830) so if one server dies I can copy the drive image to the
"spare" C & D drives, restore the data to the second disk and be up and
running again with the minimum delay. I'm thinking of sticking with SBS
2003 Standard.

We also have an old accounts/software package that is a Btrieve based
package. This is getting very long in the tooth now so I'm planning to
put this onto another server box running Windows Server 2000. By doing
this I'm hoping that future "improvements" to SBS 2003 will not trash our
accounts package.

We will also need a new network switch and I'm guessing that we will only
need a basic unmanaged switch (we're currently using a Netgear FS 524. At
present out firewall a is taken care of by a Netgear FVS 328.

Does this plan sound feasible or I'm I totally off the mark here? I'm
really looking for a fairly sound system that can be recovered as quickly
as possible in the event of a major hardware failure in the server.

Many thanks

Richard



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