Remember - there are no silver bullets :)

Have you measured performance and looked for the bottlenecks so you know you're upgrading the right thing?


NT is an old product, going out of support next year. So upgrading to Win2000 or XP would be a good step. But you don't necessarily need a new server just for that.
Upgrading the OS isn't likely to make your server go faster. But might be necessary for other reasons.


I'd guess disk speed would be an issue. Yes of course RAID can speed up disk access. But practically? Buying new disk drives every so often as rotational speeds, caching and interface speeds improve would outperform an old RAID setup. We found EIDE and RAID 0 far outperforms a 2 year old SCSI RAID 5 system!

Fast Wide SCSI is an improvement over EIDE, but the two standards keep leapfrogging each other in an attempt to win market share. SCSI drives have always had a small cost penalty, but usually they're faster than IDE and work better in a multi-drive system (with a good controller card).

Bottom line I think RAID 0, new fast controller card and new fast disks might give your old server a new lease of life without replacing it.


Even for a Terminal SeRver multiprocessor isn't much use. Our multiprocessor (400Mhz Zeon) servers are slower per-user than a single CPU 1.8G Athlon and the new desktop box will handle more users than the huge rack-mounted 3-year-old Dell super server.
For a network data server? I wouldn't reckon it's worth it.


You're using a 1GB NIC, so there's not much improvement to be had there.
How about the switch, and the desktop interfaces?
Upgrading from 10Mbit to 100Mbit gives a dramatic improvement in desktop application speed. Well, maybe. The customer also went from hub to switch at the same time, that will help too.



Just to put this in perspective. We spent £250 on a DIY kit desktop machine with 512M memory, 2x 40G hard disk in a RAID 0, Athlon 1800+ and 100M NIC that outperformed a £25,000 4-CPU server that we bought 2 years ago.
That was running the same application, same data on each box.
Not only that but it supports more users, faster, on the single CPU system when running as a Terminal Server!
Admittedly that's an extreme example, but it shows what can be done - cheap.