Developing server recommendations is kind of like tip toeing across quicksand. You are afraid of putting your foot down in fear you might sink. Where general guidance and recommendations work well for the general hardware, servers are a bit more technical to setup and manage. Servers today consist of traditional tower configuration and the more popular rack mounted design.  Please note, we do not recommend tower server solutions if more than two servers are present. Where there are three or more servers in the same data center, a rack mounted solution is more effective. Blade servers, download IDC white paper on forecasting cost of ownership for deploying Server Blades, are PCs on a card that support remote users who are running in a Thin Client mode but all the actual work is done in the data center. The most popular server technology today is Virtualization, where multiple logical software services (servers) are ran on a single hardware server. Picking the right Server Virtualization solution is not easy, but there are a number of studies available on the subject.

Standard Server Hardware comes in a number of configurations and we will provide recommendations from the three leading server hardware vendors.