Tony, Thank you very much for the info. I absolutely agree redundancy is the key. We're currently running 2 systems and looking to add 2 more. The main reason I'm going to brand name is that, we we're buying from local dealers who put systems together (or we just buy parts and put them together since we have a staff of software and electrical engineers who all think they know everything). These systems have been consistently unreliable. I've been through 3 systems that had CPU fans die over night and burnt processors/motherboards. Several banks of memory, a couple power supplies, NIC cards that don't survive power surges (something we frequently get with a machine shop in the building) and of coarse the ever failing hard drives in the RAID arrays. Quite frankly, we're tired of dealing with the ma&pa small shops. We're ready to try the high end 'server grade' equipment for the extra cost. I probably forgot to mention that we have a HP NetServer we bought on EBay about 8 years ago and it's running Win95 with a Filemaker database. This system has NEVER ONCE BROKEN (asside from some viruses spreading through our network and Filemaker being unable to maintain a network connection). So either we live in parallel universes or the Chinese are selling quality cheap parts to the UK and leaving all the junk for us poor Americans (oh no, I've gone political..). Again, thank you for your response.
