Will the XServe meet my company's needs?

MDLarson

MDLarson

Registered
We have a roughly half-n-half Mac / PC network.
We have the following equipment scheduled for replacement:
•Iomega A300u NAS - reason interface problems and non-existent 3rd party backup solution
•Old HP Netserver running Windows NT

I know FileMaker server will run great on the XServe; it's other problems I'm concerned with... Windows Domains - how exactly do they work on the XServe? Windows print serving - the XServe becomes the print server? Backup solution - I'm guessing that's what those nifty FireWire ports on the XServe will accomplish - do I need to buy a FireWire tape drive?

I've read nothing but glowing reviews on the XServe, but of the negative issues, the biggest thing for me is combining all administration functions into one box - if the XServe goes down, the company goes down. How much of an issue is this?
 
The XServe won't go down ;)
But really, wait until after WWDC, who knows? Maybe we'll have a new XServe! :D
 
The Xserve is plenty compatible with all those Windows functions your company needs to utilize. You can stick up to 4 hard drives within one Xserve, giving you either 480 GB of space or 120 GB of ultra-fast, triple-backed-up space, all via RAID. Furthermore, if you have an additional $6-11 grand to spare, you can invest in an Xserve RAID, to add between 4 and 14 additional hard drives.
 
In my opinion, if you are looking to create a new Active Directory Server running on your XServe, you will be in for a touch of work turning it into your PDC.

If you are serious about turning it into your main Domain Controller, you may want to look at the article written by the good guys over at afp548.com to help you along.

http://www.afp548.com/Articles/Jaguar/sambapdc.html

There is a little bit of work on it, but it's feasable. As for reliability of services, I have setup over 40 Xserves so far as well as just plain Mac OS X Server running on my own G4 450 and I have not had to reboot it except for reboots.'

The only problem I have encountered with it is with the Apple Mail Server in which if you do not have the Open Relay turned off, you will get nailed sooner or later by spammers.

Other than that, the Xserves are a super solution for consolidation of your services onto one server. The only thing I would suggest with the Xserve (and Mac OS X Server itself as of v10.2) is that you have proper DNS and Bind running on it in order to allow it do do proper forward and reverse lookups.

These machines are incredible and for the price, they are more than affordable. You could also set up an child server with IP failover on it on a used G4 Tower to run as a backup server in case the worst happens to your server.

Using tools like Rsync, you can have the backup server copy your netinfo, users, mail, web and anything else you need to have copied and backup up on a daily, or even hourly basis if you build your crontabs to allow it to do this.

Another long post...I am sorry.
 
Don't apologize for the long post! The more useful information you can provide, the better. If you had rambled on about nothing, then you should apologize, but I'm sure MDLarson will thank you for all the information you provided him.
 
Yeah, thanks for the reassurance guys. I'm still in IT limbo for now though... my boss doesn't want to shell out anymore money than we have to, especially since we've put a lot in already. At least for THIS small company... I'll post updates when appropriate!
 
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