New server - advice required...

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messiahmessiah
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Hi guys, I've been asked to look in to a new workgroup server set-up for a studio I do a lot of work for. I'm going to be recommending the following:



Mac Pro

Two 2.0GHz Xeon processors

1GB RAM

Four 750GB SATA HDDs

Two SuperDrives



I'll be configuring the four 750GB HDDs as a 1.5GB RAID 0+1 mirror of stripe-sets. I'm hoping that this will offer the performance benefits of RAID 0 and the fault tolerance of RAID 1.



The studio currently has a manky old G4 with an unlimited client version of 10.4 Server. If they scrap the G4, would they still have to purchase a new license for 10.4 Server on Intel, or can they simply cross-grade?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    dhagan4755dhagan4755 Posts: 2,152member
    I think I can help here. The Xserve is good, but the Mac Pro is just as good. I'm glad you're making that decision. You might want to stay with the 2.6GHz version (it's worth the $$$) and get at least 2GB of RAM. I'd recommend 4. You might not need all of that RAM now, but you may need it later.



    As far as the drives go, I would downsize the standard 250 to a 160GB, and go to OWC and pick up the other drives. They're really easy to install. I would have the server operating system on a different drive (the 160GB one) than the data. Put the data on the other drives. That way if the OS goes bad, you won't have to move your data. You might also consider partitioning the 160GB drive into two drives, one that you can clone to so if you update OS X server with a patch or server software update and it doesn't go well, you can just boot back into the other partition.



    You cannot cross grade from the PowerPC version of OS X Tiger Server. You have to buy the Intel "Universal" version as if you were buying it for the first time. Although, if you know someone with a Universal version disc that you can borrow, the PowerPC serial # will work and you can avoid that silly cost. Maybe you can work a deal with an Apple rep.



    Why do you need TWO superdrives in a Server? Hopefully you're not also using the server as a user's workstation. That would be bad.



    Here's something to keep in mind if you do install OS X Server on a RAID volume. When you install OS X Server on the Mac Pro, make sure you follow the tech note on Apple's site re: upgrading to 10.4.8, otherwise you might have a kernel panic. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304511



    Lastly your server will work much better if it has proper DNS, so if this new Mac Pro server is doing DNS make sure to set it up correctly, or make sure proper forward and reverse lookups are in your existing DNS Server.



    Cheers,

    DH
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  • Reply 2 of 7
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    Many thanks for your advice - it makes sense.



    I'm suggesting two SuperDrives because the server will be backed up to DVD every morning. We're avoiding backing it up last thing at night just in case the incremental backup is larger than 4.7GB and it requires a user to swap over the DVDs. The second SuperDrive will allow users to insert a DVD in to the machine whilst it is backing up.



    I'm also considering some sort of hard disk based backup system, but I suspect they aren't reliable enough...
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  • Reply 3 of 7
    joe_the_dragonjoe_the_dragon Posts: 931member
    hard disks are more reliable then dvds
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  • Reply 4 of 7
    dhagan4755dhagan4755 Posts: 2,152member
    Get a couple of Firewire Drives. Pick your type based on what you think will work best. OWC/Mac Sales has what I think is the best selection from notebook type drives powered by the Firewire bus to Firewire RAID solutions.
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  • Reply 5 of 7
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Joe_the_dragon View Post


    hard disks are more reliable then dvds



    How come?
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  • Reply 6 of 7
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    Have you considered staging your backups? First back up yout fulls or/and incrementals to an external hard drive. That makes it much easier to recover files and is much faster. Then during the day, back up the backup to DVD. DVD is good in that you can send them off site for true disaster recovery (say your place burns down or there is a theft, flood, roof damage, etc). That way when it asks for a DVD to span to, someone will be there to pop one in.
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  • Reply 7 of 7
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,954member
    I think hard drives are fine for backups. I haven't had any problems with them. You should have two sets of hard drives though, one set that's always off-site, and one set that's on-site and preferably disconnected from the computer and from the power except when backing up.



    I think the general recommended process is to do full backups once a week and trade the backup sets on & off site once a week too, so the off-site backup is no more than a week old. I don't know how to do incremental backups with hard drives though, so maybe do full backups every day. I think incremental backups are considered important so you can roll back a specific number of days if you have to.
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