solutions
The pictured server, an Intel SE7505VB2/SC5250-E, was custom built for a customer producing high-defintition TV animation. It will be used for content creation, animation rendering, and uncompressed high-def video editing requiring a disk array capable of 160 MEGABYTES per second.For $5,000 the customer received redundant 10,000RPM drives for the operating system, a 600GB disk array capable of reading data at over 220 MEGABYTES PER SECOND and write speeds of just over 200 MEGABYTES PER SECOND. For the digitally challenged, that's a GIGABYTE IN 5 SECONDS. It also has 4GB of RAM, dual Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processors, Gigabit Ethernet, an ATI FireGL video card, and a 3 year warranty. All this speed, the security, reliability, and compatibility of Genuine Intel hardware, and the 20 years of experience Computer Condiments brings to the party. Just to be clear, 100BASE-T Ethernet is 100 megaBITS per second. This machine is reading 220 megaBYTES per second... that's over 16 times more. Several times more than a standard PCI bus can handle, in fact.
Another customer had a disk array fail and we had replacement hardware available before he knew it... before his off-site data storage company could deliver a backup tape to restore to it, in fact. We responded with an extremely cost effective solution: we provided an economical Intel backup server with 3-500GB disk arrays. The customer now backs up 3 days a week, once to each of the disk arrays, and twice a week to tapes, which are immediately moved off-site in case of disaster. Now the customer is not only protected from a catastrophic disaster such as a fire or building collapse with offsite storage,but can restore a lost/corrupted file or an entire server immediately, and can do it as disk to disk speeds rather than waiting for tape.
A small customer has a network of about 15 of our PCs and one of our servers. For a startup company looking to conserve startup capital, we recommended and installed Retrospect Professional and a CD writer in the principal's PC to back up the network. True, we are not backing up his Active Directory or the server operating system itself, it is sufficient to handle their data until such time as a proper tape backup can be installed. They discovered that their QuickBooks database had become corrupt, but were unsure as to WHEN the corruption had occured. They had been using it for several days without knowing the database was screwed up. They provided us with CDs #8, 12, 14 and 15 of the backup set. Using only disks 14 and 15, we recovered the last 6 versions of the file and restored the 3rd one back, prior to the corruption. We did not need all 15 CDs, there was no complicated rotation and archiving procedure, and the customer was back in business the same morning. All in all, not bad for a $200 backup system and a VERY happy customer.
