Thursday 22 February 2007

SBS is Happy Today


This particular SBS installation is SBS 2003 SP1 Premium Edition running on an Intel 2U SR2400 with dual Xeon 3.0 GHz. processors. It has two hot swap RAID arrays, one RAID 1 pair for the OS, backup files, and VSS images; and a RAID 5 array of 4 drives for their data. During peak season for them, they can grow at close to 1 GB a month, so we have a rather large RAID 5 array, with archiving of older data to keep things under control.

This SBS box is up to date, and running a large USB 2.0 external hard drive for backups. We come in every couple of weeks to swap out that drive and provide an archiving service for them if need be.

I find that this box is the one that we see the most happy reports from.

It runs very stable, and other than the occasional reboot for updates, it has never been shut down.

It is serving 14 desktops as well as a number of outside employees via RWW and some dedicated RDP boxes.

Configuration:
  • Intel SR2400 2U chassis with SATA backplane option

  • Redundant power and fan option - LX chassis model

  • 2 x 3.0 GHz. Xeon 800 FSB CPUs

  • 4 GB Kingston ECC DDR

  • 2 x 500 GB Seagate SATA in RAID 1

  • 4 x 400 GB Seagate SATA in RAID 5 (1.2 TB total use)

There is till room to grow for this particular client.

Advice: If the system is dual processor capable ... always try and plug in the second proc at build time. Have fun matching the existing one two or three years down the road otherwise. And, it will be twice the cost, and at a higher CPU stepping point that your existing board may not have a BIOS flash to support!

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and burnt it! :D

UPDATE: It is one of those days, 1 GB a month is not a whole heck of a lot! :D

Looking over the logs, they can grow at well over that in one month, coming close to 1 GB every couple of days!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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