Not sure if this is the right right place to be posting this.
I am currently in the middle of the planning and design stage of building my first house. Being the tech guy that I am I have set aside a precentage of my budget to build the ultimate home network. However I am beginning to feel incredibly overwhelmed by all the possibilities. I need your advice.
I want to try and cover all of the bases and have a rock solid setup.
-Data storage
-Plenty of server power for game servers etc
-Communications (VOIP etc)
-Security (Physical and Software)
-Media
What sort of thing should I be looking at to make my dream a reality.
Your going to need a good router. a dream router in my opinion would be a pfsense router. I would use an old pentium 4 or some dual core athlon. either processor would be more then enough. a gig or more of ram would be plenty. If you really wanted to go extreme you could put pfsense on a SSD or a 10k HDD. Also you would want to put a few gigabit ehternet cards in there.
for storage either a NAS or a small xeon cpu based server depending on how much storage you want, if you go hardcore about it and go server style then you want a dedicated raid card and a dedicated network work card. and a small boot ssd, and even a caching ssd.
as for a gaming server once again i would say xeon based (reliabiltity), now the cpu and ram will depending on how many connections you want to host on it all at the same time. down to you. once again you want network cards and a small ssd boot drive ideally. you don't have to have a xeon based server as im guessing you would'nt have it on all the time like you media server but it would be my preffered choice.
Nice, very nice. i would stongly reccomend ECC-RAM with the xeon build as that's a big part of what makes it so reliable (it's what makes it worth doing in my eyes) oh yeah and there's no built in gpu with xeons so a cheapy dedicated gpu would be needed.