New server in dev need tips

Friend of mine is going to be looking into a colocation setup and he asked me to help plan it. He's got a place and will be renting a 2U rack. He want to run a server that will be long lasting with good future upgradibility and stability. I am partial for AMD and I would like to see AMD Opterons used. He will be hosting 2 main websites, video streaming, teamspeak and possibly a game. I was thinking a MSI K8D Master FT with Opteron Model 246 and 1GB of Samsung PC 2700 Registered ECC for it. He will be running 3 WD HDDs on it also. Would a RAID array be benificial? It will be a Windows based server so we're thinking Server 2003. Any tips or ideas would be greatly and hugely appreciated.


websites:
www.jg53.com
www.allied94.com

forgot to mention it will also be hosting a file FTP server.

Some kind of hardware RAID 1 would be a good idea. Something that can automatically switch over if there is a drive failure, since it is going to be offsite.

RAID0 won't be necessary, since he is going to be limited in bandwidth, due to the internet connection.

My strongest suggestion for hard drives would be a pair of Seagate 15K.3 SCSI drives in RAID 1 and an IDE drive for automated backups to reside on. 15K SCSI drives will deliver far better overall performance in server applications and they are really built to be run 24/7 and never fail.

Server 2003 is a great OS. Unless you know enough about Linux to set it up really well, then I can't suggest anything higher than 2003.

Its gonna be on a 10 Megabit connection. He wants to use Western Digital hard drives but i'll see if I can swing him towards seagate scsi drives. Where can i find info on setting up the RAID?

Xtc4u said:

Its gonna be on a 10 Megabit connection. He wants to use Western Digital hard drives but i'll see if I can swing him towards seagate scsi drives. Where can i find info on setting up the RAID?

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You need to use hardware RAID, so just follow the instructions from the manufacturer of the RAID card. It is really easy.

Do you think 1GB of memory would be enough for this server or should i pitch for more?

Yeah, go with 1 GB. After it has run a while, check in on it and see how much it is regularly using. If it looks like it is hitting it's max, sometimes, then you can upgrade later.

I haven't had any machine, so far, that has actually used a whole gig of RAM. I have a gig on my main workstation and a gig on my wife's computer, but it is really overkill. I only have half a gig on my main file server at the office and it never uses half of that and it serves 60 users.