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Rolling Your Own Business Desktops?
mike asks: "I'm mulling the logic of my company building its own desktop computers. As the IT Manager (plus sysadmin, janitor...) of a struggling-yet-thankfully-still-alive dotcom, money is really tight. We have around sixty ~400MHz desktops which are increasingly showing their age. Acceptable P4 systems from the big guys run at least $1000. By recycling the OS (Win2k), case, cdrom, floppy, and K/V/M, I figure I can assemble a good AMD system for about $600. That's a 40% savings. Is it worth it? The cost difference could very well determine whether this project proceeds or gets put on the back-burner again."
"Some negatives about rolling my own:
- Management: I won't get the special business features offered by some manufacturers. Dell's OpenImage, for example, looks awfully nice. But how much does that really buy me in a company of 60 machines? I don't use such stuff now; am I missing out on nirvana?
- Time to build: Even though we'd leverage Ghost wherever possible, handmade systems nevertheless take time to build, load, & configure.
- Supporting different platforms: Because money is so tight, I can at best afford a capital replacement rate of 25%-33% (15-20 units) per year. That means I'm committing to the support of 3 or 4 different platforms. Having just one platform is great, but how many companies, even ones that actively strive for it, truly enjoy that luxury? I inherited two platforms (Micron & Gateway); support isn't that bad. With proper planning, I don't see why we can't support four.
- Hardware quality: How much can I trust a popular Athlon chipset in a business environment? I feel silly bringing this up because I have a few Athlon systems at home, each with a different chipset, and they've been nothing but rock solid. But I know the lack of a really good chipset has been a large contributor to why AMD's aren't more prevalent in the business world. (well, that and long term bullying by Intel).
- I don't get a proven, prepackaged system that works right out of the box.
- Cost savings. Plain & simple.
- Increased horsepower per dollar spent.
- By choosing my own equipment (mobo especially), I suffer fewer OEM shortcuts.
- I have to admit that I'd enjoy the pure geek satisfaction of rolling out 'my' creation to the company.
For those that are curious, Ask Slashdot did an article on the AMD issue, here.
What's your salary/the salary of the people that will have to build 60 boxes? How long will it take? Are you sure $600 + labor costs + no manufacturer support will be less than $1,000? If not, there's no business case to do it yourself.
-matt
If you must, go out and get some low-end consumer PCs and buy a bunch of spares: it's less work than building your own and still very cheap.
While I can appreciate the geek factor here, I think you'd be nuts to roll your own systems here. It will eat up loads of your time, overall costing your company more than it would to just pay more for each system. And I'm not just talking build time. When (not if) one of the systems go kerput, you'll end up diagnosing it yourself, RMAing the defective component, replacing it yourself, testing, reloading OS (if needed), etc etc. Compare to getting a Dell or something, where you determine software or hardware. If hardware, it's under warranty, you don't have to so much as crack the case open. Saves a lot of time and therefore cash.
Even if they cost a little more, I think you'll find yourself grateful for a warranty to fall back on. Plus, when machines go boom, you aren't instantly blamed. If you roll your own, any system that crashes will be pinned on YOU, and you alone.
I know that's not a situation that I'd like to be in. Would you?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I also do the exactly same thing for a small dotcom just like the poster. I brought up the issue of building our own desktops for increased horsepower and reliability (I haven't like the experiences I've had with big name manufacturers) but they countered with "Well, if you leave, who is going to support our machines? At least we can call Dell if we buy from them." I know I'm in this position for the long haul, but they have no guarantees of that. Support is a big thing for small companies.
...and I can't really recommend it.
I worked in a 50-user shop, and provided services and equipment to a 200-user shop under contract.
In our case, the only way to get decent specs and meet the client's budget was to roll our own. The other options were too few systems, or systems too cheesy to contemplate. Cheesy as in crap, not as in creamy goodness.
If you go down that path, my suggestion would be to make sure you have confidence in your component choices, and that all your component choices interoperate flawlessly. Any system you have to see again will blow the savings - your first callback or return could be fatal. Make sure you source quality components, and if you're trying to minimize the number of discrete configurations, buy all your components at once.
Spend money on decent cases with good power supplies. Don't yield to the urge to "cheap out" on components that "don't matter" - they all matter. Don't buy cadillac parts, but make sure everything you do buy is good quality, sound, and durable. Keep extra original parts on hand, especially a mobo or two.
Come up with a logo and have the stickers printed - it amazed us how many people would readily accept a brand they'd never heard of, but would never accept an unbranded system.
Your initial problem will be evaluating a number of different hardware options, then settling on those you want to standardize on. Once you get to that point, what do you do with the bastard love children of your prototype period? Don't deploy them to users, you'll water down any faith and confidence your production systems should inspire.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
I used to build machines for other people (family members, etc.) Now I just tell them all to buy a Dell because the hassle on me to maintain them is WAAAAAY less.
Preach it, friend!
For the last near 20 years I often built systems for friends, family, or businesses who wanted to save money. But these days I can't build them cheaper than Walmart sells them. The only time I build a system now for anyone other than myself is if all they want is some old wreck good enough to get on the internet and I already have the parts laying around.
To the guy who started this discussion: You start out by comparing a pre-built P4 system to a scratch-built Athlon system. You also need to be looking at Duron/Celeron pre-builts. I bet there is only a handfull of people in your company, if ANY, who need the power of a P4 or a top of the line Athlon. A Celeron or Duron would them just fine, and you're not going to build something from scratch with either of those that is cheaper than what Dell or Walmart can sell them to you for.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Waaaaaaaaaaait a minute. (Not you, the original questioner).
What's really wrong with these systems in the first place?
He's got an assload of 400 MHz P2s, probably Slot-1-based, and each box has either 64 or 128M of PC100 SDRAM.
Why not buy a bunch of Celeron or P3-800ish chips and FCPGA (new-sk00l slotket), and another 128M of RAM for each of them?
I think you could get a decent CPU and RAM upgrade for less than $100 per box.
Moreover, you wouldn't have to reimage any drives - it'd be a straight hardware swap, with maybe 15 minutes to figure out what voltages the motherboard supported, and to configure the slotket or motherboard correctly. (If you had quality components to begin with, this might even be automatic).
Add onto that maybe 15 minutes per desktop to properly apply thermal transfer paste.
No EULA concerns, no hardware/driver concerns, and it's dirt cheap.
I'd bet that you, plus one or two of the "hardware geeks" (you know who they are :-) in the office could do this overnight for $100 per desktop, plus the price of a case of beer and a couple of large pizzas with all the trimmings.
This guy is either going heavy 3D, or something like that...or he has quite a strange concept of "obsolete". Add some RAM to those machine be happy with them.
*sight* People don't know how to take care of computers anymore :-(
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Hard drive: You do not want a bottom-of-the-line hard drive. It's not economical. If the current standard midrange size is 80GB, get an 80GB drive, not a 40GB. The small amount of savings you get for the large loss in space are not worth it.
Only on a standalone system. On a LAN you end up with workstations with lots of useless diskspace or worst provide an incentive for (l)users to store work on the local HDD.
Support for plain vanilla PC's is easy, you could pay high school geeks $10 an hour to fix them up. It's only when you get to laptops that things get tricky.
my $.02
Remember the article the other day when we all laughed at the Wilkes Barre IT guy who stopped the IBM maintenance on the AS/400 ? Well, this is the same kind of thinking: penny-wise and pound foolish.
Remember: support contracts are a form of insurance. They insulate you from the risk associated with the issue at hand. When looking at any form of insurance, you have to take into account what the worst-case senario is, and if you can handle it. In your case, the scenario is that you have multiple desktop failures, including critical failures of important machines (ie, severl of your main developers). Do a cost analysis: if I do a roll-my-own machine, what's the cost of it breaking? How much does it cost for that developer to have no (or a seriously inferior) machine for a week or more, vs. the 1 or 2 days a supported machine would be out?
For small companies, (especially those heavy in software development) I can't imagine a situation where the TCO of a fully-supported system is worse than a roll-your-own box. None The downtime and IT personnel time alone will kill that equation. For huge companies, it may pan out, but for a 60-desktop company with 1 IT person? Not a chance.
You need to put this into perspective with Management. Once again, they are looking at only the up-front costs, and none of the hidden costs, which in this case are the majority. Explain to them what the true cost of a desktop is, and how NOT buying a supported machine results in a WORSE return over the next year.
Now, here's a couple of recommendations for getting SUPPORTED desktops into your organization while not breaking the budget and still meeting increased performance needs:
I don't mean to harp on you personnally, but this kind of thing is why IT has a long, long way to go before being really professional. Folks, this isn't a garage. IT folks need to quite thinking like it's an expanded hobby, and also need to remind the Executives of this, too. It's a Profession, not a Trade.
-Erik
Systems/Network Architect and former SysAdmin
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.