I've been burning a lot of cycles lately thinking (and reading) about servers. I need a light-duty fileserver for a small LAN with about ten workstations. Years of experience tell me that a server belongs in a rack, should have hot-swap SCA SCSI drives and a proper serial console, which is helpful for remote management.
My first instinct was to look at Sun's 1U servers. The Sun Netra T1 AC200 is a discontinued (but still readily available) 1U rack-mount server with an UltraSPARC IIe microprocessor and SCA drive bays. It has a nicely–balanced architecture with storage on one 32-bit PCI bus and I/O on another. Both of the 32-bit PCI busses hang from an appropriate 64-bit PCI bus. Sadly it lacks gigabit Ethernet and tops out at 1 Gbyte of RAM (enough for now, but it's always good to have some headroom).
A logical step up from the AC200 might be the Sun Fire v120. It's similar to the AC200, but it can take up to 4 Gbytes of RAM. Sadly it also lacks gigabit Ethernet and seems to cost much more than the AC200. I was leaning towards SUN because their systems are designed and built with unix in mind so they understand disklabels and kernels. They also have a decent serial console.
One slight concern is that if I should be hit by a bus, the people using the server might end up having to find a somewhat housetrained BSD or Solaris geek, a surprisingly difficult task even in a university town. The final "deal-killer" for the machines I've mentioned so far though is the cost of SCA drives. I know that they're appropriate for a multitasking environment and that they supposedly have longer MTBF, but I can buy two or three SATA drives of comparable capacity, with the same warranty, for the price of a SCSI drive.
Giving up on Sun's UltraSPARC servers for a while, I went on to look at 1U servers with AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon microprocessors. Currently I'm leaning more towards Intel because I'm told they're more cooperative with the open-source community and that their hardware receives better software support in return. Tyan used to be famous for their server mainboards and I was interested to see that they also sell barebones servers with hot-swap SATA drive bays. Their "Tank " series looks promising. I was also a little startled to find that Sun now sell 1U Opteron servers such as the Fire X2100 brand new for less than I am being quoted for refurbished UltraSPARC boxen!
The real catch to any of these servers is that almost anything rack-mount is going to be proprietary and I'm wary of vendor lock-in. I could put an mITX board in a Travla C146 case, but it's a challenge to find an mITX board that has 100baseT and SATA without a lot of multimedia/HDTV chaff, the PSU in that case is proprietary and there's no room for hot-swap drive bays. I will keep looking for an appropriate server, but in the interim it looks as though I'll have to hack something together in an ATX tower case.
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