Look beyond today

Servers now aren’t what they used to be in the past. Not only have their sizes
Shrunk, they also now offer amazing speed which one could not associate with those giant servers of yesterday. The wide range of contemporary servers available today presents a Hobson’s choice for buyers------ which one to buy, which one not to. To and this dilemma of the buyers , here’s a report that prescribers go for the very best now , else you may regret later.

EASY ON THE CPU

Although most servers are not used for high end graphics, there are still plenty of reason to incorporate a powerful processor. Intel appears to have the server
Market sewn up, and we advise you to stick to Intel microprocessor –based servers and shun those featuring an AMD or a Cyrix CPU.

Good servers start from the 45MHz Pentium ll, but it is prudent to go for one of the new Intel Xeon chips. With their increased external cache capabilities – up to a possible 2MB – and enhanced I/O performance, these newer chips are ideally place to gallop through your data.

If the server will need to execute processor –intensive applications while simultaneously handing file and printer sharing on a large network, you ought to consider a machine with SMP (symmetric multi-processing) capabilities to keep as much of the workload as possible away from the CPU. SMP allows a server to run more than one CPU ( up to four with NT4 and beyond this figure with the enterprise edition

IMPROVE YOUR MEMORY

A server in full flight can make pretty short work of your megabytes. So, make sure you get plenty of memory .this means 64MB for the smallest network requiring basic file and printer sharing , and 128MB for everyone else. For extra peace of mind , make it ECC ( error checking and correction )memory. This should, in theory ,check and correct any errors that befall the data making its way across the system.

Networking needs

the choice of network card is usually a foregone conclusion , with Intel’s excellent EtherExpress proappearing in most models. There are other cards, though , and another one to keep on eye out for is 3Com’s Etherlink III.
High data –transfer rates are just one reason for always specifying a SCSI interface for a server ----IDE simply does not have the speed to cope with the enormous workload required of a network. Another advantage is the large number of devices that are possible to connect at one time (usually between nine and 15.)

The softer side of servers

Hardware is only one part of the server equation; there is also the operating system software to take into consideration. And as with the servers themselves it depends upon your application as to what would be the best software solution.

There are three leading products to choose from: network from Novell, Microsoft Windows NT and Unix --- the latter coming in a number of flavours, but all basically the same. Of these, network is still very much the frontrunner when it comes to file and print server, having been developed specifically to provide file and print sharing capabilities, and enjoying substantial performance advantages in this area as a results. Well over half of the PC network already in use have network servers installed on them.

That said, network doesn’t make a very good application platform. Application have been ported to the necessary netware loadable module (NLM) format, but few developers have bothered a this remains difficult to program. Instead, Unix (and now LINUX) has become the predominant application platform, although windows NT is now challenging that dominance. That is because Microsoft has made it a lot easier to develop for the NT platform, and with so many windows desktops and windows application around there is a lot more expertise to top into.