hey guys... im a lil clueless about server hardware.. and there specs... anyone know of any decent places to get information about them? which is a good buy... specs you should looke for.. something like that? :)

thanks!
kunal

kunal,

I suggest you do a capacity planning of your server and then go for the specifications. Very often every one does the mistake of doing the product evaluation before finalising the high level requirements

If you want to know how to scientifically do a capacity planning I can help you

Cheers
Balaji

MotleyFool, go ahead.. hit me with your thoughts :)

Well kunal, it's a bit long winded as many of my posts so bear with me. :)

1. You forget everything you know about hardware

2. List your expectations out of the server as numbered requirements : example 1. I need to host my site 2. my dog's photos 3.give free email to all the MP's in India [not that many of them can read and write but hey thats another story!] and so on

This list is what sets the boundary of your expectations. It need not be specific and can be a wishlist even

3. Now you get down to specifics and see if you can convert your expectations to functional requirements - ie. I need atleast 25 pages in my site with some 100 pics; my Dog has 231 pics but I want to show off 45 of them; and there are 600 MP's in India [I really dont know the current #!]

And when I say 25 pages , half of them have my favourite Miss World [so it keeps changing] so I need it to update the latest Miss World automatically from 1 page

And I also need an option where if an MP coming to my site will give his swiss bank account info only I should have acces to it and so on

4. Now you convert this functional requirements to system requirements [web server , SSI support, email server, SSL etc]

5. Once you have your qualitative system requirements you do a quantitative requirements analysis [what nice words! well this is how we make a living charging 150$ an hour for this kind of bull..;) ] - I expect atleast 1000 visitors to my site especially during parliament session and the world cup cricket or Madhuri Dixit is ill and they are browsing from lousy internet cafes so it should load in less than 3 sec on a 28K modem etc.

From this you identify your required storage space [and if you want to be realistic triple your required disk space and then for safe measure multiply it by two - cos as PArkinson says data expands to fill available space], your required RAM, your required processor, OS, and then you come up with your dream configuration...

Once you come up with a config and bandwidth requirement you will generally find that the reqd budget is too much so you either up your budget or go back and trim your wants.. you do this back and forth 2-3 times and you will then be a sadder and wiser man and you will have realistic expectations and that is when you go for the actual vendor [when you are reconciled to a config that you feel you can live with]

I am trying to make light of a disillusioning process but the fact is that hardware sizing is never a win-win game and in my experience always a compromise.

I have missed several obvious things like availability, scalability and reliability requirements and also performance and disaster recovery

What I can do is prepare a questionnaire and send it off to you tomorrow and based on your answers I can try and help you size to the best of my ability..

But I hope you get what I am trying to say

Nuff of my bilge
Cheers
Balaji

ok.. all this makes good sense.. but how does one go about chosing the actual hardware?? what should one look for? which are the loop holes??

Well there can be no hard answer for this.

The first obvious step is to choose your configuration and this should be the result of your capacity planning as above

Once you choose that, you should take each individual component of the server like motherboard,processor, NIC,RAM,Hard Disk, power supply etc and then look for price/performance/reliability matrix of each product with all the vendor info

Anandtech or some such site can help you here

For example SCSI vs IDE is a question you can debate on till the cows come home; and if it is IDE, do you want maxtor or seagate or something else is where you have to do a lot of review-mining and research

Basically what are you going to do with your server? That will drive all the answers

I know I am not giving specific answers but then it's like asking which car is best and no one can tell you the answer - if you ask what car is best for me then you are the best to decide that [others can tell you their positive and negative experiences and some expert opinions -decision can only be yours :)]

Cheers
Balaji

true... hmm.. i guess ill dig around... thanks!

Welcome- sorry I couldn't be of much help :)

You can have a look at this thread

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=42092

It's things like this that need to be found out for configuring a server

Cheers & Good Luck
Balaji

perfect.. thanks ;)