Other pages in the review
As business grows to rely more heavily on the Internet for its back-to-base connectivity and customer dealings, many are finding the need to source faster connections to the Internet for their servers. One option is to install a business-grade fibre or wireless connection to the office. This can be a cost-effective solution depending on the connection speed you need, but it also introduces issues that will need to be addressed to maintain a reliable level of service. These include factors such as uninterruptible power, security and cooling for the servers.
Another option is to use server co-location, whereby you purchase a server and host it at a data centre. The data centre takes care of the power, physical security and cooling.
Data centres typically charge by the amount of space on the rack you use as well as the amount of data being transmitted. This is one of the principal reasons why you would use a 1RU (one rack unit)—the smallest possible rack mountable form factor for a server. You pay a premium for a 1RU server but that cost can usually be recovered in savings over a year or two from using less space in a hosted environment.
A blade server offers higher density of computers per rack unit but the catch is that a blade server chassis will still require a minimum of four or five rack units regardless of how many blades are installed, meaning that it becomes much less economical in a data centre if not fully utilised.
Generally with 1RU servers the slim form factor of the housing limits what you can do with internal expansion and redundancy. While it is not uncommon to have a redundant power supply, most will only accommodate a maximum of two PCI expansion slots and no more than four hard disks. Sound cards are omitted completely and the motherboards include an on-board graphics solution. Some manufacturers, such as IBM and Sun, use smaller 2½in hard disks to save space but have much lower capacities. With PCI-Express taking over from PCI-X nearly all the servers offer options to choose one or the other through purchasing the correct adaptor to slot into the motherboard (commonly called a riser).
For this review we set the budget at about $6000 (to keep a budget conscious focus). We tested servers from Xenon, Acer, Dell and Sun. IBM also participated but unfortunately submitted a $12,000 x3550 server—just too far over our budget to be eligable for our Editor’s Choice award. We have included it, however, as it provides a good comparison to the other servers in this review.