Topic: Server motherboard - all in 1- recommendations?

[k_graham]

I think its time for a new server instead of a converted workstation. It seems to me the best server would be the one with most functions integrated.

My current system is a older PC with 2 Western Digital 1 Terabyte SATA Enterprise drives mirrored.

I believe their are Intel and perhaps other motherboards that include SAS embedded controllers and Dual Gigabit Lan on the mother board but it seems like DELL, HP and IBM sell these with controllers and LAN cards as options separate. I see Western Digitals SAS harddrives are the same 7200 rpm as their SATA drives so wonder if there is any advantage to SAS in that case - I see SAS is also available in 15,000 RPM drives but they appear to be 5 times as expensive for equal size so given SATA drives have been sufficient expect to be going with the Cheaper 5 year warranted Western Digital Enterprise SAS or SATA.

I'm wondering if anyone has either built a server with integrated controllers and LAN or knows of manufacturers using these?

Also just a thought but if the drives can be hot swapped I was wondering about the feasibility of having perhaps a set of mirrored drives with possible Hot spare and assuming a free 4th slot having that as the backup drive instead of USB?

I was also wondering how file transfer speeds compare between Mirrored and Raid 5 . 

Thanks,

Ken

[janet]

k_graham

I'm wondering if anyone has either built a server with integrated controllers and LAN or knows of manufacturers using these?

Yes
Look at Intel offerings, but check the specs anyway to be sure.
You will probably need to run SME 8.x to get support for the newer motherboards.
Re controllers (and by that I assume you mean hardware RAID array's), you are usually better off to use software RAID1 with two drives and a standby spare, unless you are going for a larger RAID array.
In the "older days" of hardware RAID, it was always a good idea to buy an identical spare disk controller card in case of board failure, that way your disks were still usable simply by swapping in the new controller card.
These days perhaps you need or should buy a spare identical motherboard if you insist to use onboard controllers with hardware RAID arrays.

If using non server (but good quality) grade motherboards, I usually buy a spare identical system that can easily be swapped into situ in the event of a m/b failure. It can be used as a workstation or backup server until needed in an emergency. Simply swap the drives and be up & running quite quickly. Hardware is relatively cheap these days,

Many professional users of SME suggest to buy a low end server grade product from Dell or HP etc, to get better reliability, support & warranty etc. Ask the sellers re Linux compatibility, but most manufacturers have models that support Centos 4.x & 5.x.

Also just a thought but if the drives can be hot swapped I was wondering about the feasibility of having perhaps a set of mirrored drives with possible Hot spare and assuming a free 4th slot having that as the backup drive instead of USB?

AFAIK the currently used kernels in SME 7.x & 8.x do not support hot swapping of drives, so that functionality may be sometime in the future.

[Stefano]

ken, how many users?

[k_graham]

ken, how many users?

Only a maximum of 5 users but we keep graphics files for recall and reuse, a Point of Sale, Job Costing and still have 600 Gigs of extra space on mirrored Terabyte drives. We also open our email to accept large files. The only limitation has been the backups and restores and the desire to have them simple enough for an employee to do when I am away.

My current SME system times out if attempting a restore of a single file from the server panel so I have been doing nightly data file backups with Winrar so file compression is offloaded to our graphics computer. With Dar2 installed I've been doing a pruned backup of all but Ibays, but this could be difficult to restore by an employee if I am away, so I want to change this procedure.

Mary did mention alternating backups to USB attached drives but I believe a alternating backup would leave incremental backups with days 1, 3, 5 on one Hard drive and 2,4,6 on another - still with consideration to this I am thinking I could do a Total Backup to Graphics Workstation starting Saturday night with daily incremental backups after and then copy the backup and incrementals to 2 drives alternating backups daily so the entire sequence for the month ends up on both drives. If a new faster processor server can retrieve individual files from a backup then I might be able to quit doing the Winrar backups.

The other option may be using the old server as a Affa backup but I actually have 2  offices 80 kilometers apart to backup so am not sure how 1 AFFA backup server would take care of this. If it can be easily done I would after initial cloning put the backup server at home and utilize internet for updating it.

Regards Hardware, while I like the idea of a shiny new server I prefer the idea of a server I can fix with generic off the shelf quality parts I can buy locally or as Mary suggest keeping a spare motherboard. That means $100.00 Lifetime warranted power supplies which can fit a Worstation or server instead of $300.00 hot spare server supplies that might have special connectors requiring a exact replacement , 5 year warranted Hard Drives, etc. While up time is important I can survive 1/2 a day downtime - if its mission critical to the WEB I would put it in the Cloud. This is one of the reasons I like SME server - compared to a Windows server the hardware requirements are low and somewhat generic as if I keep it that way.

So if people have recommendations on all in one motherboards or servers by the big guys built with them I would like to hear.

Thanks,

Ken

 

[janet]

k_graham

The other option may be using the old server as a Affa backup but I actually have 2  offices 80 kilometers apart to backup so am not sure how 1 AFFA backup server would take care of this. If it can be easily done I would after initial cloning put the backup server at home and utilize internet for updating it.

Affa can backup multiple sites using different backup jobs quite easily.

Remote backup or restore of 100's of Gb of data files will take days (the size you refer to in earlier posts).
I would not contemplate using Affa or any other sort of off site backup over the Internet where there is 100's of Gb of data involved.

To backup 100Mb (mega) of data (over the net) will still take a long time, just think of how long it takes to send and receive a 100Mb email file, let alone a 100Gb email file.

If you have a lot of changeable data every day, then you will have speed issues using Internet to backup remotely.
Remember outgoing speed is usually much slower than incoming unless you have professional grade & expensive Internet connections.

[Stefano]

ken.. hp microserver with 2 or 3 hd.

[k_graham]

k_graham

Affa can backup multiple sites using different backup jobs quite easily.

Remote backup or restore of 100's of Gb of data files will take days (the size you refer to in earlier posts).
I would not contemplate using Affa or any other sort of off site backup over the Internet where there is 100's of Gb of data involved.

To backup 100Mb (mega) of data (over the net) will still take a long time, just think of how long it takes to send and receive a 100Mb email file, let alone a 100Gb email file.

If you have a lot of changeable data every day, then you will have speed issues using Internet to backup remotely.
Remember outgoing speed is usually much slower than incoming unless you have professional grade & expensive Internet connections.

Hi Mary - I was thinking in terms of local backup with
Affa then carrying that server home and keeping it up to date via inernet but yes even that may be too slow. It would be nice to try  when I can say I have a spare server.

[k_graham]

ken.. hp microserver with 2 or 3 hd.

Thanks STEFANO I have left a message with HP.

[janet]

k_graham

...alternating backups to USB attached drives but I believe a alternating backup would leave incremental backups with days 1, 3, 5 on one Hard drive and 2,4,6 on another - still with consideration to this I am thinking I could do a Total Backup to Graphics Workstation starting Saturday night with daily incremental backups after and then copy the backup and incrementals to 2 drives alternating backups daily so the entire sequence for the month ends up on both drives.

You seem to not believe that the incremental daily backups will include all data not yet backed up to that disk.

You initially need to get a full backup on both USB backup disks. If you start with both disks empty this will happen automatically (with the setting for allow full backup on any day set appropriately) eg Friday & Saturday nights.

After that the system will do incremetals to both disks on a daily basis, comparing the full backup against what is on the server.
On either drive the incremental backup will include ALL files not yet backed up to that disk.
Yes the incremental backup file numbering will be 1,3,5... and 2,4,6... and so on, on each disk, but the daily changeable data WILL be automatically backed up to both disks.

Call it whatever you want to, differential, incremental, differential/incremental, the name doesn't matter. What I describe is how the system behaves.

I keep 2 backup sets on each disk on a 2 month rotation, and I need to manually intervene to allow the system to create a new full backup to the second disk when the subsequent scheduled full backups occur. This can be achieved by deleting the appropriate backup set or deleting all files on the second USB backup disk. As mentioned above this will cause a full backup to run on a day when an incremental is scheduled. If I forget or am unable to do this at the time, then the system will use the older full backup that is on the second USB disk and continue on happily, with all data still intact. It's just that the two disks (or sets) will have different base full backup files.

[k_graham]

k_graham

You seem to not believe that the incremental daily backups will include all data not yet backed up to that disk.

You initially need to get a full backup on both USB backup disks. If you start with both disks empty this will happen automatically (with the setting for allow full backup on any day set appropriately) eg Friday & Saturday nights.

After that the system will do incremetals to both disks on a daily basis, comparing the full backup against what is on the server.
On either drive the incremental backup will include ALL files not yet backed up to that disk.
Yes the incremental backup file numbering will be 1,3,5... and 2,4,6... and so on, on each disk, but the daily changeable data WILL be automatically backed up to both disks.

Call it whatever you want to, differential, incremental, differential/incremental, the name doesn't matter. What I describe is how the system behaves.

I keep 2 backup sets on each disk on a 2 month rotation, and I need to manually intervene to allow the system to create a new full backup to the second disk when the subsequent scheduled full backups occur. This can be achieved by deleting the appropriate backup set or deleting all files on the second USB backup disk. As mentioned above this will cause a full backup to run on a day when an incremental is scheduled. If I forget or am unable to do this at the time, then the system will use the older full backup that is on the second USB disk and continue on happily, with all data still intact. It's just that the two disks (or sets) will have different base full backup files.

You are right Mary that I am very cautious regards the backups -  Currently my backups have a NTFS format and of course backups on them. The article I quoted mentioned that incremental backups are based on the archive bit being turned off so only changed items with archive bit set would be read and at that time archive bit would turn off. Differential would have the main backup with archive bits turned off but all new files would be copied each night but archive bit not turned off so each night would see an increase in file size until you did the month end backup.

A test to confirm its a differential backup would be to create a directory and each day add a new text file perhaps labeled Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Assuming the  SME is backing up in Differential Mode and a Full Backup happens Saturday night then Sunday and Monday text files would show up on the backup if one could open to restore the individual files on Tuesday - if only Sunday or Monday file was there then its an Incremental backup and should not be done with 2 disks - Is your system powerful enough to open the menu  system to check if this is the case - or perhaps with the Midnight Commander method if not?

Normally I would simply try what you suggest but I believe I need 2 drives formatted to EXT3 or possibly FAT32 and as I've mentioned my system is not powerful enough to do individual or partial restores - it times out.

If you are correct then SME's backup page should probably be changed to Differential, if it only puts one of the 2 days text files on the last backup disk then you will no doubt want to change your backup procedure.

Assuming you are correct and I am wrong, I may use the SME backup with a new Server if it can restore single files from such large backups the Theory being to reinstall SME from CD, then include the backup on first reboot. Easier for staff used to only Windows.

Regards my earlier desire to be able to change the slice size to 1500 megs so as to fit 3 per rewriteable DVD, it is no longer applicable to me as there are way to many disks required. In fact using Winrar I have gone the other way as my backups are NTFS formatted I am able to create  a 50 or 100 gig file or 1 as big as my Terabyte disk so 1 file = 1 Ibay - though I may eventually split them at 25 Gig if I buy a BlueRay - then I could save year end backups over a few BlueRays. I think we need EXT4 for the equivalent in Linux.

Thanks,

Ken

[janet]

k_graham

see this re equip recommendation
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,48312.0.html