Building a file and NAS server: capacity, ZFS or Storage Spaces, and 10/25GbE (UK 2026)
A file server is one of the easiest builds to get wrong, because it looks simple and is not. Buy too few spindles and rebuilds take days; pick the wrong filesystem and you inherit a snapshot and integrity story you did n…
DIMM population rules: how to fill memory slots for full bandwidth (UK 2026)
Two servers with identical CPUs and the same total RAM can differ by a third in memory bandwidth, purely because of how the DIMMs were placed in the slots. Memory population is not cosmetic - it decides whether you get t…
Supermicro GPU SuperServer buyer's guide: cost-effective AI inference and training nodes (UK 2026)
When a team needs more accelerators per pound than an integrated appliance will give them, the open-hardware route usually points at Supermicro. Its GPU SuperServer families cover everything from a single workstation-cla…
HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen12 buyer's guide: single-socket 1U for edge, VDI and dense hosting (UK 2026)
The reflex when buying a 1U HPE server is to reach for the dual-socket DL360. For a large share of real workloads that is a socket too many. The ProLiant DL320 Gen12 is a single-socket 1U built for exactly the jobs where…
NVMe-oF in the data centre: disaggregating flash from compute (UK 2026)
For years the fastest storage in a server lived inside that server, bolted to its PCIe bus, stranded the moment the box was busy or idle. NVMe over Fabrics breaks that link. It lets a pool of flash sit in its own enclosu…
Scale-out vs scale-up storage: choosing an architecture before you buy hardware (UK 2026)
Before you compare arrays or price drives, there is a more fundamental fork in the road: do you grow storage by making one system bigger, or by adding more systems that act as one? Scale-up and scale-out are not just two…
How to spec a VMware vSphere host in 2026: a UK build guide
Most virtualisation hosts are bought wrong in one of two directions: over-specified on cores you'll never licence, or under-specified on memory and RAM-bound within a year. This is the build framework our engineers use w…
RAID 1 vs 5 vs 6 vs 10: choosing the right level for your server (UK 2026)
RAID is the one storage decision people copy from the last server without thinking, and it is also the one most likely to lose data when a drive fails. The right level is not a matter of taste - it falls out of three num…
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