Server Storage Options (SAS, SCSI, SATA)

I'm currently trying to get quotes for servers for a new school which we are opening, which will be for 1,000 pupils.

I've been looking at the following servers, Dell PowerEdge T610, the IBM System x3400 M3 and the HP ProLiant ML150 G6.

It's a few years since I have bought a server and expected the specs regarding storage to be much higher. I just received the following email from the Dell partner:

I'm wondering if Dave's response could be correct? SAS 2.5" drives are already available at 600GB's here and the smallest size currently available from that company (Toshiba) is 300GB which is the maximum size the server can accept according to Dave the salesman for Dell.

If I go ahead with this option, it's like I won't be able to buy drives for our new server, beyond the end of this year, since 300GB 2.5" SAS drives will be already obsolete. Am I being fair here? Have I missed something?

I'm reluctant to go for SATA, because I've always thought of this as a desktop or entry-level server technology. Is this reasonable?

Seven years ago I bought a second hand Dell PowerEdge 4400 with 8 front loading hot-swappable SCSI drive bays. The server was already 4 years old then as I bought it on ebay. Each drive was 73GB if my memory serves me correctly. I'm just trying to get server as decent as that, but I would expect the storage capacity to have increased in the last 9 years. I doesn't seem to have done though. Am I looking in the wrong places?

Any help, advise or comments would be really helpful. This is a charity school for the poorest children in Manila who live on a dumpsite. I really want to get them a good deal

Thanks.

peter

 

I'd go for the Dell or IBM server just my two cents

SAS is faster and better then sata but you pay for it. It also has more I/O then sata drives.

What will the server be used for? Domain controller etc. and I can give better advice.

If used for mass storage I would take sata drives and save the money. May want to consider a RAID array depending on how important the data is.

 

Ok, lots of surprises here! It seems that SATA really has found it's way into mainstream server systems. I had no idea of that.

I'm also getting the impression that it's too early to adopt SAS, due to the price and the low number of GB's per drive.

Have SCSI disappeared now? I don't hear much about them anymore? I would have thought they would have been filling the gap until SAS become more viable?

The server will be running 3 visualized Linux O/S's on a hypervisor. On instance will be running the proxy server/firewall, another file and print and the other will be a backup webserver for our website (main webserver is on a VPS in the US and it uses a DNS failover server to redirect to the backup if necessary).

Thanks a lot for your advice and thoughts guys. It's really helping me to put this decision together. Would be interested to know the status of SCSI though?

pete

 

It seems you guys would recommend SATA. According to the Dell server specs these are my options for the PowerEdge T610

I want to take advantage of hotswappable and RAID -5 while getting the most possible amount of storage and still being able to buy drives for the machine in 5 years time.

Not sure whether to specify 3.5" or 2.5" drives? The trouble is that 2.5" drives have a maximum size of 250GB's according to the above server spec. But if I go for 3.5", I'm worried that they won't be available in 5 years time?

I also find it disappointing that if I choose 3.5" drives, I'm using the original SATA 1.5Gb/s spec, not SATA II 3Gb/s (let alone SATA rev.3 - 6Gb/s which has been out for nearly a year)

Another thing which really confuses me is that 3.5" SATA drives are now available at capacities of 2TB and according to the above server spec, the server supports up to 8 drives of that capacity but the maximum server storage capacity is 8TB. I would expect it to be atleast 16TB? Any thoughts on what happened to the other 8TB?

Also, I guess this means that as bigger drives become available, they will be on no benefit to this server :-(

Any help, thoughts or insight would be most valuable to me at this time as I really need to understand the effects of the decision I'm making here.

Thanks for your patience guys.

peter