 |
|
|
|||
| |||||
Need a new server but only have AU$2500 to spend? The range of options is surprisingly good as long as you're willing to do without some of the fancy features.
As I sit here in my "server" room racking my brains about how to start this review I begin to realise what a techno-geek I really am. Having a custom-built four-square extension to my home has its benefits â€" complete with separate regulated power, UPS backup, 11 full-height server racks, and an upgrade from my previous broadband link to a synchronous link complete with a full range of static IP addresses.
Why? It isn't like I haven't got an office to go to during the day, complete with very similar equipment I didn't have to pay for. Yes, despite popular belief, we at the Test Lab never get to keep the goodies we are sent each month to review or test for clients, unless of course we are happy to hand over the money and buy them ourselves. This is why I am destined to be penniless.
I have all of this basic IT infrastructure technology in place at my home for the pure pleasure of playing with servers and their associated applications and operating systems and working them together. Not to mention the plethora of peripherals and appliances found in the average datacentre such as, firewalls, routers, remote access devices, drive and backup arrays, access points, switches and the like. I honestly must be really sick to take delight in making something work like this just for fun, particularly when it has no real commercial value except to increase my personal knowledge of those devices.
When one really takes the time to sit and contemplate the subject, there is a wide range of applications these sub-AU$2500 machines can be configured to support. There are also many auxiliary services these servers can provide, from small or branch office data storage facilities and document sharing servers, to group e-mail and/or Web servers. Almost any task that can be offloaded from the main servers would suit these machines and indeed could increase the life of their bigger siblings by handling the chores that were beginning to slow down the other units.
They could even be configured as prototype test servers in a large IT environment to allow project managers to simulate what-if scenarios and to test configurations before going live or before committing big dollars to larger servers.
Or how about clustering them to run the online Web service, sharing the load across many servers and allowing easy future scalability as well as a high level of redundancy at an affordable price? It may indeed be better to buy 10 servers for AU$25,000 and cluster them than one server for the same AU$25,000. Certainly easier to add another few machines to the cluster in the future than have to ditch the one server and spend even more money on a bigger server. This clustering attitude also helps to mitigate the risk of data loss and potential single-point hardware failure risks.
So let's look at the products we received from Acer, Altech, HP, and XENON. We also asked Apple, Dell, Hallmark, IBM, Ipex, NEC, Sun, and Westan to submit products but we received a pretty low response to this category.
