5 ways to choose right server

If you are confused to decide which server would best suite your organization, the first step is to understand the limitations and benefits of each available options. In server space, there are three basic types of server - Tower, Racks and Blade. It should be noted that apart from basic considerations like cost, space, power, cooling each type of server excels and lacks in different areas, so making the right decision is essential to preventing problems in the future.

When buying a server, there are three considerations:

1. Server type: Tower, rack or blade?

2. Hardware configuration

3. Server software 

Tower Server

Tower Server is considered to be the black horse of the IT industry. It is the most basic and well recognized server and it has all those components of a traditional server, starting from motherboard, hard disk etc. SMBs or businesses where space is not a hurdle can be benefited by tower server. These are very powerful because they can have more drives than the other options and cooling time is also less.

Processing power of the tower server is considerably less than the rack and the blade server. Therefore they are best suited for hosting basic file serving computation. Not ideal to run integrated application and structured databases.This is ideal for small organizations having less than 25 employees on the network.

Biggest challenge in this server is the space it requires. Since towers are limited to wall and floor space, their scalability becomes limited. Aside from being the largest servers available, they also have an average higher operating cost which includes power, networking, and management personnel. They are also not the ideal solution if mobility is a concern.

Rack server

As the name suggests, these are specially designed to be stored in racks. To address the challenges faced under tower server like space, availability, and higher operating cost. The main motivation behind the design of rack servers is to provide vertical and horizontal scalability. Apart from holding rack servers, it is also used for SAN devices, rack consoles; power backup devices, and much more. This means that you can store everything in one place.

Today a rack server is still the most desirable form factor among mid size and large organization. The core advantage it delivers is to give max computing power with highest number of processing units (CPU). It means the rack server can scale up to maximum CPU than tower or blade server.

However the key drawbacks for rack server are the consumption of power and cooling (due to high CPU utilization) and density compared to blade server.

 

Blade server

Blade server was introduced primarily to address the concern of the ever-growing, sky rocketing cost of real estate. This server was named for its ultra-thin shape. Multiple blade servers can fit inside a single common console called chassis which has all the power and cooling fitted into it and distributed evenly among the entire blade server. Consolidating a traditional server infrastructure into space and power saving blade enclosures means:

• More processing
• Less space
• Less power
• Less time and money spent on management

 

Blade servers are great for businesses that require much larger computing capacity or for businesses that plan to develop a data center.

Bottom line

Although each server type mentioned above has its unique pros and cons, the parameter to choose the right server depends on the following:

1. Size of the business and workforce

2. Nature and type of computation- example file serving, mail messaging, applications, databases etc.

3. Predicted growth of user/computation in 3 to 5 years.

4. Number of separate business units and function within the organization and need for consolidated approach within IT.

5. Adoption of newer technologies for computation to minimize infrastructure cost and ease overall management.