by Bryon D Beilman
One question I get from clients is why by a server class machine vs a workstation or a desktop. If your looking strictly at cost, sometimes it is difficult to see the value of spending more on a server instead of a fast workstation. So here are some things to think about.
1) Reliability and Redundancy - Servers are generally built to be more reliable. Servers generally provide services that are required by more than one user. What is the impact of that server going down and how many people are instantly non-productive?
But wait, that was a general statement; why are they more reliable? Options for redundant power supplies, RAID (redundant disks), and even redundant memory. If you moved to certain brands of blade servers utilizing a SAN, you might even have full server redundancy. Servers also are designed with premium fans for cooling and Hot swappable (front facing) disks to allow component failures without down time. From personal experience, I have found that workstations do not have fans that adequately cool the components while under a high load.
2) Expandability and Performance - I think it is generally true that you can buy a workstation that has a single faster processor than most servers. But what about expandability. Most workstations may support a single dual core CPU and 8 GB of memory and up to 4 JBOD disks, which will do alot of processing. Servers , however support 2+ processors, 64GB of memory and 8-16 RAID disks. (It is true you could buy a RAID card for a workstation, but many servers come standard with hot swappable RAID).
If you decide that you don't need that much memory or CPU's, then consider what happens if you business expands. Could you expand the memory or CPU on a server instead of buying a new workstation. If you used VMWare, you could run 4-6 individual servers on a single quad core CPU and if you needed more servers, then add another CPU and more memory and the same machine could handle another 4-6 Virtual machines. Less Power, less space and doing the work of 8-12 servers on one powerful, redundant server.
You may also be able to use Terminal services and extend the life of your current old desktops by turning them into a Remote client. I could go on....
3) Hidden Gold -We will work with whatever vendor a particular customer likes (IBM, Dell, HP, Egenera, etc), but for small to medium sized business, I particularly like the HP Proliant series.
It comes with ILO and Proliant Support Pack that works in both Windows and UNIX. ILO is HP's version of out of band management which is the ability to manage your server even if it an OS is not running (or even powered off). It is essentially a remote web console and purchasing advanced ILO gives even greater management and capability.
The Proliant support pack provides drivers and utilities, but even more valuable is built in monitoring and reporting. If you want something that notifies you of component failures or you need to hot swap a disk and want to see the status of the automatic RAID rebuild, this utility will do that. Both come with the server.
Other vendors have their OOB management solutions (Dell Sun, IBM, etc), but the point is that these features come with a server, not a desktop or workstation.
If you are a small to medium sized business, why would this be important to you?
Why buy a server? The real question is , why not buy a server?