How to choose a server for the office?

Question

Server equipment

Greetings.
Ask for help from more experienced users.
The company decided to install a server rack for file cleaning and backup servers. no more than 20 computers...decided to do ubuntu samba and ovm for a backup server.
OS will be Linux.
What characteristics are enough for this?
How to choose?
I thought we’d manage to just buy a couple of system units and that’s it, but, the boss is against it, he says if you do it well, and then maybe we’ll also do our own server 1c, and not in the cloud as it is now.

Tell me how to choose the right one? And then I ran around the sites, they recommended me assemblies of 600k each. I think it's a scam for the most part.

Answer 1

Usually, such tasks begin with technical requirements (technical proposals), that is, with something like this:
"I want to solve such, such and such problems, and so that like this, like this and another one like that"
That is, without specifics yet - stand- not a rack, a server is not a server, dances start from the task . About how this task should be solved, you need as much information as possible - the more, the better.
Then a technical task is written (yes, it’s very stupid to write a technical specification for oneself, but it happens very often), where the means and methods for solving the problem are already prescribed - “to solve problem A, service B is deployed, to solve problem C, service D is deployed, to ensure for the operation of services B and E, server E is deployed with the Jo operating system, to ensure the smooth operation of the Jo server , a backup system Z is additionally installed based on service I running on server K. Here, the question is
usually considered: remote access to the BIOS - power protection, correct shutdown in case of accidents
If you have a budget in advance, that's good, all questions are immediately evaluated taking it into account. If not, the budget is calculated on the basis of the TOR and is defended by the management.
Linux or Windows, Mikrotik or tsiska - it all depends on the task . There may be import substitution in the conditions - and there not only linux will be needed without options, but also specific linux from the register of the Ministry of Communications and nothing more than - no bubunta, harsh aster / alt / redos / calculate

Answer 2

The main question is how high is the load on file access? otherwise, some gigabyte projects in Photoshop are pulling, and there are 20 such people, and at the same time, while others will upload a document per megabyte once a day and that's it. Same for volume, how much are you going to store?
So, a file server with 20 clients has almost no processor load and any machine can handle it, but the disk subsystem and network load can be high, hence the requirements.
If the requirements are high and you need gigabytes here and there and preferably in seconds, then you will have to fork out for a 10-gigabit machine (this is not so expensive, old server motherboards, not very old intel processors and the price is about 40 thousand rubles).
If the requirements are low, then in principle any office machine will do (remember about non-ECC RAM and a tiny chance of data corruption on such), only the ssd disk is not even discussed, in frequent cases you can combine slow hdd and cache on ssd (bcache). A software raid based on mdadm and/or bcache/zfs is desirable.
I’ll keep quiet about 1s for now, the loads there are also not typical. But I strongly recommend not to mix the functionality of the application server and the storage server, although of course you can combine it under light loads. It’s a very good practice to place tasks on virtual machines from the very beginning (with paravirtualization, lxc, it’s free in terms of resources) so that it’s easier to later scatter over the hardware when the load increases ... and in general, it’s very nice when you can add on the go (at least a temporary ) the machine into a cluster of virtual machines, and using live migration (by the way, this is hardcore) to transfer the working software to it, up to the possibility of turning off the main machine, and users will not even notice. but for this, the NAS storage server must be a separate machine
ps Very good question, do you need a file server? and that is, situations where just syncting synchronization will be enough? literally, a shared folder on all machines, everything is synchronized with everyone using syncting, everyone works locally, and the main problem is collective access to the same document at the same time (it appears with the file server, but different), plus the load on the local network as a whole (since sending everything to everyone is stupidly expensive in terms of traffic, but often this is the price that you can 'pay')

Answer 3

ubuntu samba file cleaner

Install Windows Server. Samba has serious blocking problems when accessing the same source at the same time.

OS will be Linux.

My condolences. When you install Windows Server, you will understand why.