Hardware Recommendations for a School Server?

nychef asks: "My school has decided to give me money to set up a server for my club. I'll be running e-mail for about 250 people, and webpages for about 100 which will mostly be static webpages, but there will be a few dynamic ones. I am trying to figure out just how powerful I need the hardware to be. They gave me a pretty decent budget, but my budget is to include the internet line. So I want to maximize bandwidth and minimize the cost of the server. I am looking in the range of dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram. Is this adequate or overkill?" nychef has a budget of about $4,000. What kind of hardware and bandwidth options do you think he can afford?

Comments

it's not overkill

[Lord Sauron]

People are saying it's overkill, but it's not, once you realize you'll be able to run a (Q3|UT2K3|CS|whatever game) server on it to play during class time.

Re:bandwidth

[D.A. Zollinger]

RAID5 is good for redundancy, 1gb of RAM is cheap, but Dual P4's is a waste of money for that setup.

I totally agree, go with a hyperthreading processor to help simulate multiple processors, but stick with a single processor solution. If you are supporting that many individuals, you also may want to consider a backup solution, and back up all of the e-mail and web data on a regular (weekly) basis. For what you are doing, you might get by with an external firewire or USB2 hard drive that you connect once a week and start a copying script before you leave friday night.