small-office server

So I've been asked to setup a windows 2003 server for a guy I know and his business. I've worked with the OS little, not loads so this will help expand my knowledge. However never built a PC for such a purpose. And so, I have no idea what kind of requirements it needs to run smoothly. Will a low-powered skt754 Sempron suffice? 512mb RAM or 1gb? Or do I need a huge number-crunching dual core Pentium with expensive DDR2?

Would a VIA Epia be too underpowered for such tasks? Just thinking of it as an option to save on power consumption, except the initial outset is quite high!

Cheers

You want reliability and solid performance, nothing screaming fast is required.

I don't know what is considdered the most stable platform these days, or indeed what is a goodchipset to go for. An EPIA would be far too underpowered. You'll want at least 1gig, i would go for 2gig of RAM. Quantity is more important than cutting edge speed i think.

Disks are also important. I would go for RAID-1 as well as a backup solution. RAID is no substitute for backups. Depending on budget, there may be benefits to having a raptor as a boot drive and a couple of Western Digital RAID edition drives (or similar) in RAID-1 for storage.

I'm sure others will chip in as well, but this is what i would be looking at for starters.

you might be better off suggesting a Dell server

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/pr...dt1&l=en&s=bsd

OK they're basic at the low price range but they do carry support and you can easily upgrade these servers with more RAM etc.

You're going to need to factor in buying CALs for the users.

*cranks up his stuck record *

Small Business Server 2003 its the dogs danglies :) - good value and feature packed!

The server doesn't need to be rip roaringly fast , but it will need plenty of memory and some redundant disks. Also consider your backup solution - tape/rev drive is a good choice .

I'm not a big fan of the way that dell pre install SBS2003 but otherwise they can be quite good value.

Just a quick reinforcement of what Funkstar said - reliability is king. Don't skimp with this - not only do you not want the blame if you lose any data, but remember that if it's the only server, the business could be losing money for every hour that the system is down.

I've seen both big and small businesses make this mistake - save a few hundred pounds on hardware, and lose much, much more in lost work.

Anyhoo - you can save some money buy buying SBS over windows 2003 - SBS has Exchange & SQL thrown in, and costs about half the price of plain windows :) Can be a pain sometimes though with set up, due to the way they've integrated things, but worth in the end, IMO

As Moby has said - the Dell preinstall is nasty - do it again yourself

One thing you didn't say was what the system would be used for, and how many clients - these are very important. If it's just going to be used as an email and file server for about 5 people, then any proc and a RAID 1 7200rpm set up will be fine. Bigger tasks obviously need more.