Mac Pro as server?

[Pressure]

Anyone have experience with using a Mac Pro as a server (or Xserve/RAID) that both handles different partitions with pictures, work in progress and also the daily backup?

Our current solution is tape (1GB) and a unix based server (getting old). We are thinking that it would be a good idea to get rid of the tapes and upgrade the current server to being able to handle both.

Option 1:
Pretty much a standard Mac Pro but with 2 x 2.0Ghz 'Woodcrest' and Mac OS X Server.

We are buying ram (most likely 8x1GB FB-DIMMs) and 4 x 750GB hard drives to fill up the Mac Pro. We need different partions on the the first two hard drives and then we need the other two to mirror those.

I guess my question is, if it is possible with the above solution?

Option 2:
Buy an Xserve RAID, which seems like the much more expensive solution, if option 1 can do everything we want to.

Any advice is welcome

 

[hayduke]

It really depends upon what your needs are. I use a MacPro as a data and compute server for a research laboratory. It works perfectly for us. If you can state more clearly what your needs are then someone can give you a better answer. Do you have large storage needs? High speed processor needs? Mission critical uptime needs? Large upload bandwidth needs? What are you doing with the system? Home use? Small business? Enterprise?

 

[Pressure]

Sorry, we are an advertising agency and will basically use it as our data center, where we are storing ongoing projects and finished projects in Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop/Quark and so forth (this also includes RAW images). We currently only have about 370GB of data on the current server, so the new server will be a breath of fresh air.

We already have the entire network infrastructure in order (well, had it for the last 20 years anyway) but we need a new server for storage and backup.

The Mac Pro should be sufficient for this with Mac OS X Server but I am just wondering if anyone have any experience with it using it as both storage and backup and what kind of setup you run.

We have upgraded all our other machines to Mac Pros, so we might as well do it with our server, as we are running out of space and it is getting pretty long in the tooth.

We thought that instead of using tapes for backup, we could use RAID Mirroring or do anyone have a better solution?

Technically speaking we are using 4-6 partitions for different data and need to back those up at night.

 

[Umbongo]

You probably won't need anywhere close to 8GB of memory. Get 2GB and see how it goes.

If you are using RAID 1 to provide redundancy, you should still back that data up.