Servers

What to look for when buying a Server

So you're looking at buying a server. Servers are computers with specs designed for high performance and availability. Although servers can come as desktop towers most servers are designed to be rack mountable, which means they are sized to fit on a standard data centre rack.

Servers can range from $500 to over $8,000 for more powerful machines. The average rack mountable 1U server will cost around $2,000. Some common server brands are HP, IBM, Intel and ASUS.

Some key factors to consider when purchasing a server are form factor, installed RAM / technology and processor speed / quantity. Some common form factors available are blade, rack-mountable 1U, rack-mountable 2U, rack-mountable 4U, rack-mountable 5U, tower and micro tower. The installed RAM can range from 256 MB to 8 GB and RAM technologies include DDR2 SDRAM, DDR2 SDRAM and SDRAM. Processor speed can range from 1.0 GHz to 4.0 GHz and processor quantities are 1 or 2.

Other considerations would be platform, compatible operating systems, chipset, controller type, maximum supported RAM and security features. Compatible operating systems include Microsoft Windows 2000/2003/2008, Novell NetWare, Red Hat Linux, SCO Unix, Sun Solaris, SuSe Linux, UnixWare and Microsoft Small Business Server.