HP Proliant Servers - Appreciate your advice

[willawake]

I am looking for a new server for a company on a budget, i have been offered a new HP Compaq Proliant ProLiant ML350 G3 or G4 for a good price. The G3 has ServerWorks Grand Champion-LE chipset and the G4 has Intel E7520 Nocona chipset. These are basically entry level Xeon servers which would be provided with 3 34gb hdd in raid-5 config. They are 5U :o pedestal or rackmount 8) chassis.

What i am interested to know is who manufactures the motherboards. For instance MSI is oem manufacturing IBM servers now :o :o :o . Anybody have any idea if the proliant servers have crap caps.

The second question is whether it is best to go with the serverworks or with the nocona. Nocona is getting much criticism due to incompatibility with some PCI-X cards. They are to issue a modified chipset to fix this. On the other hand the serverworks is criticised for low performance.

The third question is whether to go with windows 2003 server for file and print services or windows 2000 server.

The fourth question is that because this is a pedestal server modified for rackmount (that is why it is so cheap) the hdd drives are mounted vertically. Since SCSI drives are expensive could less life be expected from the drives because of the vertical mounting?

anybody with any ideas, your contribution is appreciated. Basically because this company is on a budget I dont want to make a bad choice.

[Topcat]

I know as well as you do that MSI boards boards are plagued with crappy caps. Perhaps the newer server grade stuff has better caps.

As far as chipsets, my Intel SHG2 Xeon server boards are serverworks grand champion LE chipsets, and they're solid as a rock! I've not so much as had a single hiccup or compatability issue with RAID, SCSI, NIC's, video, and so on! Running over a month straight now without a reboot and in hellishly hot conditions. On top of that, they perform VERY nicely!

So the serverworks systems get my vote. Intel also designs motherboards based on Serverworks chipsets. Intel doesn't produce crap on the IT platform, so if there were problems with it, Intel would have dumped them long ago.

[willawake]

Good to know that you are happy with that chipset. I have been researching and it seems to be quite popular in recent servers. I have also seen some very expensive servers with the hard disks mounted vertically so that is probably ok too.

I am totally down with intel original equipment not only on the server front. if it was my money i would be going with an intel original rackmount 2u chassis and board. the problem is that it would mean going with gateway here to have a warranty which is necessary and the prices are too much. the HP offer is good because it is a 5U chassis so they know that you will not be using it for dense enterprise or colo serving so the price is low.

hope that they have good caps on the proliant servers.