Xserve, or what?!

[anders_t]

Hi!

We're a small company that's plannning on expanding from 4 users to maybe 8 or 9. We'll be working from different locations (cities) here in Sweden. The database consists of some 4.000 posts (just text, no media). We're 100% Mac-based.

What I do know is that we'll need a static IP, but we're unsure what's suitable for us - will an Xserve, hosted by an internet provider, be overkill, or is it possible to make it work by using a fairly new, dedicated computer and a service like no-ip.com or dyn.org? Will that be reliable?

Any suggestions are welcome!

regards

Anders

[Steven H. Blackwell]

An X-serve may not be overkill, but it's not the best machine for this purpose. Get a G4 or G5 tower where you can swap out the SATA drive with an UW-SCSI one.

As for the hosting, you could do it or you could get someone else to do that.

Steven

[anders_t]

Can you please explain why the Xserve would not be the best machine for the purpose?

And do you know if the services provided by no-ip.com and dyn.org can be regarded as reliable?

regards

Anders

[Steven H. Blackwell]

And do you know if the services provided by no-ip.com and dyn.org can be regarded as reliable?

Have no idea at all.

Can you please explain why the Xserve would not be the best machine for the purpose?

As I said, with the towers you can swap out the SATA drives for UW SCSI. I don't believe the drives can be swapped out in the x-serve, although you might be able to use an external RAID. For as light a load as you were describing, I would use the tower G4 or G5. In fact, you can run a fairly heavy load from one of those.

HTH.

Steven

[Ferrell Beleshko]

Xserves are just fine for this, infact all of our hosted FileMaker clients and otherwise are generally working off Xserves. Except in cases where Microsoft specific server software applications are required. As far as swapping out drives I am not clear on why it is necessary for such a small amount of data. Further to that the new Intel Xserves do provide for the use of SCSI drives if needed.

That being said our next round of gear purchase will include some of the new Intel xserves with the faster SCSI drives.. but the drive choice is more for our needs in hosting applications and files for our clients.

Anders if you want to give external hosting a shot I would be willing to give you free hosting for a couple months on our servers sitting in the North American Data centre... this would give you a true test of WAN accessibility with your FileMaker DB.

Just contact me directly [email protected]

[Steven H. Blackwell]

It's drive reliability and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) that argue for SCSI drives over ATA more than speed.

Steven