New Hardware for the Home Office

Since I wrote my original post on my home office I have expanded my network and hardware at the house. Some of this came about as I discovered some things I wanted to change and part was just chance.

I decided to change around my network just slightly to accommodate having a persistent IP address for the house. That way I can bring up a development server to test new sites and I want to develop for customers and to provide a test environment for Windows Sharepoint Services. So I changed out my cable modem and went with CableOnes Small Office Home Office plan. The cost was the same as I was paying for high speed internet before but now I get 8 Megaabits download and 1 Megabit upload and a persistent IP address.

To provide a permanent server for the network at the house I got

• A Dell Poweredge 840 with a quad core processor and 4 750 gig drives in a raid 5 configuration for 2.25 Terrabytes of disk storage and 8 gigabytes of ram. It run windows server 2003 63 bit. It's primary purpose will be to act as a domain controller, support my sharepoint site and host virtual machines for testing and certifications.

My primary laptops are as follows:

1. A Dell 1720 with 4 gig of memory, a wireless card, a gigabit card, dual 160 gig 5000 rpm hard drives and a 2.2 Ghz core duo processor (this is a T7500 that can run 64 bit OS's). It has Vista Ultimate on it. It has a windows experience score of 3.4 primarily because of poor graphics performance.
2. A Dell Precision M90 workstation with 4 gig of memory, a wireless card, a gigabit card, 160 gig 7200 rpm hard drive and a 2.2 Ghz core duo processor (again a T7500). It has windows Vista Business 64 bit on it. It has a windows experience score of 5.2. It has a much better graphics board so I use it to drive my dual Samsung 26" monitors.

So my office at the house now consists of the following:

1. Dell poweredge 840 server with 2.35 TB of disk in a Raid 5 array.
2. Mac Mini with 2 gig of memory and a 1TB FireWire drive. I probably need to get Leopard for it sometime.
3. Both the Mac Mini and the Poweredge are hooked into my 25" flat panel (one through the DVI and one through the VGA)hat I use to watch TV and downloaded moves. It also doubles as a monitor for the two computers. I just wish it had Picture in a Picture so I could have both monitors up while watching TV. I might have to break down and buy a new one that supports PIP and POP.
4. My two 1TB World Books for SAN storage and to back up the poweredge.
5. Dell M90 workstation docked with dual Samsung 25" monitors.
6. Dell M65 workstation docked (3 gig of memory in it).
7. Dell Inspirion B series laptop running windows XP (1.25 gig of memory and full MS office for development testing).
8. HP 2840 all in one LaserJet printer / scanner / copier
9. Dell 1720 workstation docked
10. All connected through a 16 port switch with a wireless N router for my wireless devices (a couple of mobile phones and the laptops occasionally).

All of the local network is 1 Gigabit with Internet access through the cable one modem at 8 megabit.

Actually it never ceases to amaze me how cheap all this was compared to when I had SmartBridge 10 years ago.