Is an old HP ProLiant ML370 G4 useful?

A friend is replacing the servers in her office and she says that I can have her old HP ProLiant ML370 G4 for free. That's great except I don't know a thing about servers or server software. Is a "server" simply a beefed up PC with special software? Can I put a Linux variant on it and get something useful? Is it even worth investigating, and if so, what's the best place to start?

I DO have a small office network and I am guessing that it might be useful as a backup device on the network, but I am wondering how much hassle and expense there will be to set it up.

Any comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

Looks like a decent box to me.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12029_na/12029_na.HTML

 

Dedicated server software is "beefed up" in that it tends to be more reliable than standard PC kit. In most cases, being reliable is far more important for a server than out and out speed.

On a related subject, servers tend to have resilience built in with multiple hard drives and/or power supplies. RAID hard drives are almost (and should be) mandatory for example.

Also being able to do multiple tasks at the same time is far more important for a server than a desktop, as many users will be using the server at the same time. So systems like multiple CPU and SCSI hard disks are very common (RAID can also help here).

So a server may be slower at single actions than a desktop, but should be able to handle doing lots of things at once much better.

For a server, the display is mainly there to provide basic information to the operator and output simple data. Therefore, video cards are very basic (but not as poor as they used to be). High resolution isn't usually a problem nowadays, but 3D performance will be poor. Servers don't make good games platforms.

So if you want a rock steady reliable office PC, then an old server should be fine. Just don't expect to be playing 3D games on it. The downside will be power consumption and physical size - they can be brutes.