Give your server an extreme makeover

There’s nothing particularly special about a server. It’s just a big PC, designed for lots of users all wanting to save files, print documents and run shared applications at the same time.

And just like a PC, a server will soon run out of steam as you add more users, store more and bigger files, and generally make increased demands on what it provides. At that point you’ll need to either upgrade or replace it, and there are advantages and disadvantages to each option.

Find and replace
Buying new is sometimes the best option, especially if the server you’re replacing is more than a couple of years old. Technology will, inevitably, have moved on and you’ll be able to do a lot more with what now comes as standard, even on low-cost, small-business servers (see 'What’s new in servers' later).

The latest dual-core processors, for example, are a lot quicker than anything you may already have. Some vendors claim gains of up to 150 per cent, making it feasible to replace several servers with one or two new ones – a process known as consolidation. Add the latest server virtualisation software and you end up with a more flexible, responsive solution you can adapt to suit your needs.

Newer servers are also more energy efficient, saving money on electricity and cooling bills. Even the most basic models have masses of Ram, Gigabit network interfaces and a wide range of storage options as standard at remarkably affordable prices.

Replacing a server is still a costly exercise. Not only do you need to buy the new hardware itself, you also have to move all your data and applications onto it, and that can cost as much again, if not more. You may also find you have to upgrade the operating system and application software to gain any real benefit (see 'Software matters' later), adding even more to the overall bill.

However, if you can’t afford a new server, or if you’ve just bought one and would like to make it work a bit harder, there are still lots of things you can tweak to give you more bang for your buck.

Upping the memory
Surprisingly, processors aren’t high up on the list of upgrades. Fitting a faster processor or adding a second CPU to a two-way system may seem like an easy upgrade, but it isn’t always a good option, especially on older servers where the chips involved may be long discontinued. Newer processors just won’t fit and swapping the motherboard to accommodate them can be expensive.

Memory, however, is now cheap and can have a huge impact on server performance. Even on a basic file and print server where, for example, doubling the 256-512MB supplied as standard could cost as little as £45-£50, but have dramatic effects on performance.

That’s because the extra Ram can be used to speed up disk access, with the operating system able to cache large blocks of disk data in memory even though it may only be transferring small amounts to client PCs.

With more of the data in memory, chances are the next request can be satisfied without having to go back to the much slower disks, with write requests similarly cached and flushed to disk less often.

Figure 1 (see pdf) shows the effect extra memory can have on file-sharing performance. Here, we doubled the amount of memory on an entry-level Windows 2000 server, originally supplied with just 256MB of Ram, improving file-sharing performance by more than 25 per cent at high loads.

Notice, too, that although upgrading again to 1GB gave further gains, the improvement was much less marked. This was because the server had just one 10/100Mbits/sec Lan interface, which limited the number of client requests it was able to handle.

When we fitted a second adapter, the extra memory beyond 512MB had a much bigger effect, illustrating the importance of also considering changes to other components when embarking on any upgrade

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