G'Day,

I have the possibility of getting an older Compaq server from work and am wondering what everybody thinks its chances are of being a successfull backend box.

Compaq Proliant 6000
4 X CPUs Pentium Xeon 400 MHz/100 (1 MB) Xeon Processors
Smart Array 3100ES SCSI RAID array controller
16 X 9.1 GB Wide-Ultra SCSI-3 drives
Dual port 10/100 NIC
Has all redundant fans and power supplies.

I have quite a few slots, so space for cards isn't an issue.

I'm thinking of running a couple of PVR-250 or 350 cards out of the gate, and thinking about HDTV down the line.

What do you think? Does this old horse have the juice to handle what I want to start with, and down the line HDTV?

Has anyone had any issues with mutliple CPUs and HDD arrays?

ps. Should work great in my basement as a space heater as well...

Thanks,

Wade

It should work as (may even be overkill) a backend server although I'd be curious to see if it could handle displaying video realtime. I suspect a PVR-350 or NVidia card would help a lot.

I think a Xeon is roughly twice the throughput of an equivalent nonXeon Pentium so that would place each processor at the 800 MHz rate. It should work but there will be other factors you'll have to consider like noise and power consumption. I'd bet that beast will dim the lights in the neighborhood when you turn it on. Cooling will be an issue as well.

Do a search on SMP and you'll see there are others using it.

Good luck!

Andrew Lynch

I think you don't need much power on a backend box, so that should handle it all fine.

As far as I can tell backend CPU power is needed for transcoding and recording from cards that use software encoding.

Most of the horsepower is needed in playback, specifically HD playback. Storage of HD material just means the the PC dumps the stream to disk, so there's not much CPU power used.

It does however use hard disk space, and the maximum that server will have is 145GB (Less if you use redundancy), which isn't that much when storing HD video. My recommendation, would be to set that up as a RAID 5 drive (giving 136Gb of single fault-tolerant space) and then add in extra ATA drives for the main video storage.

Mephi

If you're not paying for electricity I say go for it. Otherwise you should seriously consider just building a cheap PC with an Athlon XP and big IDE disk for your backend. You'll probably end up coming out ahead $$$ wise after only a year or two. Plus you'll have less hw config issues, produce less heat, and have room for a coffee table where the 6000 would have been.

My .02
Gonz

I agree. For backend only, all you need is a small CPU, some RAM, a NIC, a tuner, and a huge harddisk. Practically any recent (1995 or later) computer can handle it especially with hardware MPEG encoders like PVR-250's.

It's the frontend display that takes all the processing power. Especially with HD. You are not going to want that monster in your living room -- the WAF would be extremely low.

Andrew Lynch