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Where Do You Shop for Server Components?
Devi0s asks: "Along with many other Slashdot readers, I have been building my own PCs for years. I use hardware review sites such as Ars Technica, Tech Report, and Tom's Hardware Guide to research the components and pick out the best, and I use PriceWatch and ResellerRatings to find the best deals and to make sure I am dealing with a reputable vendor. I work in a small consulting firm where money is tight, and I'd like to test the waters with a few ideas of my own. In each case, various servers and external storage enclosures are needed on the cheap that will be pushed to their limits. Are Slashdot readers building their own servers and storage enclosures? What web sites provide the latest news, research, and and comparisons for server hardware? Where do you go to buy server components and vet your vendor?"
Time is money. Lots of it and as any person who has done any hiring (especially in small to mid size businesses) will tell you, personnel costs are among the largest financial obligations you will have bar none. Therefore, I actually find it more cost effective to 1) perform an analysis to best determine needs based on anticipated traffic (Slashdottings aside) [GRIN], and 2) purchase a complete system from a vendor based upon the outcomes of the analysis. Spending time rolling your own hardware can be cost effective in some circumstances, but do not overlook the time you are spending on this project. A simple cost analysis should suffice.
Also, if needs are low, common desktop hardware (even outdated hardware) can meet needs sufficiently without the need for a Server OS. (I have an old G3 iMac running a desktop OS X serving up one of the oldest online textbooks available on the Internet, Webvision which routinely serves up about 45,000 hits/day of graphics intensive webpages). For larger needs or e-commerce for medium to large businesses, you obviously need something more substantial. After looking at solutions from Dell, Sun and SGI, and a local whitebox builder, believe it or not, Apple makes some pretty nice servers servers at very cost competitive points. We will likely be picking up a couple in the near future for some very heavy data intensive work we are embarking on. The nice thing about these solutions is that we can develop the code cross platform from some Linux workstations and fairly simply deploy on the Xserves.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Seriously, for everything. That, or ive had lots of luck with small local shops, if i need the parts NOW. there always nice about returning stuff, even if its your fault you broke it -_-;;
I shop at Newegg.com they have pretty much everything I need.
I pretty much buy everything there. Yeah, I might save a couple dollars here or there hunting down some new source, but they're usually close to cheapest on everything. Plus, they use a cheap FedEx which gets me my stuff within a few days.
Exclusively from Newegg. They are unmatched.
If a million monkeys randomly pounded on keyboards, they would all log into AOL.
newegg is always my first choice for anything I buy. If newegg is out of stock on something, mwave is the second place I go.
I'm using a mix of Apple gear, Xserves and XRAID, and so I guess you know where those come from. I also use Netapp gear for storage and Dell servers, mostly 2650 and 1750 models. I had a few whitebox systems left last year but I have got them all decommissioned and replaced with Dell gear. The reason? reliability AND support.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
ibm.com
Of course, you can go to an IBM reseller and get a year old solution for about 25% of the original cost for a machine. Why mess around when you're building a server. Ostensibly a company will be using this to either make money directly or support the making of money in some other area of the business, so why mess around?
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
There are lots of companies that supply OEMs in my area. Companies like Minta, ZT Group, Stars Micro, and Eastern Data. These companies will gladly set you up with a Net 30 terms account.
Companies like this are great for commodity parts like hard drives, CPUs, and memory.
Building mission critical systems from motherboards that won't be available next year is NOT a good idea.
For systems like that, I either use Intel boards (3 year warranty), or I buy complete systems from Dell. I've even bought stripped down Dell NAS boxes and upgraded the CPU, memory, and hard drives to save some money.
Rolling your own systems makes sense for workstations, but for mission critical servers, i'd only buy from a vendor that can guarantee that parts will be available for the service life of the machine.
-ted
Just do it...
They are the best I have ever deal with.
This space for rent.
on the cheap that will be pushed to their limits
Is that the the hardware, or you when it breaks down? Seriously do you want the headache of supporting crap?
Insert joke about "In Soviet Russia the cheap hardware pushes you to the limit"
ebay.
While I agree with many of the previous post regarding Newegg, I would also have to add in that http://www.servercase.com/ has a much better selection of cases, especially for things like disk arrays and specialized accessories associated with rackmount hardware.
its like makin love in the gravy
My company is big enough to get good pricing on HP servers from CDW. We have our personal sales rep that also helps out with support issues and since we are big enough we get a nice return policy.
HP's are good servers and rock solid. The ilo lights out capability is nice too since it allows us to do a cold boot remotely over the LAN if the OS locks up to where access over pc anywhere, terminal services or the raritan kvn is no good.
there is one point of contact for tech support which makes things easier. Parts are shipped next day air most times with pre-paid return shipping.
You might think the stuff you buy off of Newegg or ebay or whatever for your own machines works fine and saves you money, but for enterprise-grade server solutions you don't want to mess around with that junk. This isn't a toy; it has to work. The Quake 3 framerate is a lot less important now than whether you can get 24/7 support and service. So just call up Dell or another reputable server vendor; when it comes down to it you save money, no matter what it sounds like now.
On the note of full machines (and yes, this is somewhat of a shameless plug for silicon mechanics), most of our customers come back because of the quality of service. Our prices tend to be reasonable, but every one of our customers (especially the small ones like wikimedia and livejournal) will tell you that customer service and support is what keeps them coming back. If you're not building machines in-house, no matter where you buy your machines, as a business, a large part of the equation must include the quality of support you get if/when something goes wrong (because something will always eventually go wrong if you have enough hardware).
As someone else said earlier, smaller companies tend to be willing to go the extra mile to keep their customers happy, and that's worth a lot.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Newegg is the bestest online and offline computer store!!!
I'm going to add my name to the list of many who say "only newegg". It's true. Their return policy is stellar, and it's a snap to return something under warranty on their web site. Sometime you pay a little more (although not much), but it's always worth it.
There is one exception. Newegg is a stickler to the rules for LCD monitors which say the monitor is not defective unless their is some minimum number of dead pixels. The best place to buy monitors is "MonitorsDirect" who will take a monitor for return within 30 days for any reason. (And I took advantage of that to return a monitor with a single dead subpixel!)
My approach is to put together rock-solid RAID arrays, and consider the servers to be more or less disposable -- I buy whatever I can get four or more of at a time cheap, then set one or more up as a hot spares. Their lifetime for most purposes is 2 years and then you just throw them away. IMHO, for most purposes, high-end servers are a waste of money, and build the fault-tolerance into the level above that with hot spares, fail-over, etc. This is not the solution for time-is-money folks, but you said you wanted to do this on the cheap.
We have a Dell corporate account and the deals you can get there are amazing provided you're willing to wheel and deal and threaten a bit. Usually you can get upgrades to the server or a nice switch thrown in. I don't buy Dell on the desktop but their servers are good gear and priced right. Plus haggling is fun and I don't have the time to build my own servers.
This guy is way out there
The post above was very correct. Often overlooked hardware can be put even under the most gruling of tasks. My employer, a medium sized digital animation firm, runs about 100 computers all needing various levels of access throughout the network. Some of our designers run quad boxes with gigs ontop of gigs of ram. Yet our Firewall (Openbsd), IDS (Openbsd, different box), and web server (Freebsd, quite graphics intensive with 20,000+ hits a day. All of our customer contact is done through a custom CMS.) All of these machines are Pentium II's 233-300 mhz. We're quite happy with the security and speed and power of our servers. Also, during the company's startup we had what most would call a bootlegged render-farm consisting of any machine we could find and run our software on, ranging from P3's to 486's. Like for our purposes, running an IDS on a 3.0 Xeon with 4 megs of cache would be quite useless because the attack serverity of our network ranges from script kiddies trying to exploit php to port scans from our isp. But the question at hand. Newegg. If newegg doesnt have it, you're gonna have better luck going to the vendor direct. Newegg owns.
I go to the local Fry's and Best Buy and and get what their very knowledgeable staffs recommend.
Quote:
"...various servers and external storage enclosures are needed on the cheap that will be pushed to their limits."
You are about to discover why server vendors are still in business, even though commodity parts just reach new lows in pricing.
I wont bust your balls, or tits(?) over trying to do IT on the cheap.
However, you will need to make some choices.
Cheaper hardware will only buy you hardware designed for consumers ( do you recall the IBM Deskstar models that had a monthly hour limit of usage ? ).
If you need to buy hardware that wont blow up under load, and you can get replacement parts for ( especially outside of business hours ) you should stop and go back and review products from IBM, Dell, and Compaq.
Recognize these vendors call it a server since they do test these things under load, test compatibility under cirumstances that your describing, and provide service so that your consulting shop wont be twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to run down to the local swap shop to get a new motherboard.
Those of us responsible for maintaining services ( DB, Email, etc ) dont build servers unless our backs are against the wall. Even then, we buy HW from the same vendors who make the servers.
Why ? Our job isnt to build hardware. Its to make email flow reliably, keep end users data available whenever management is willing to pay for it, hopefully you get the drift.
Since your in a small consulting shop, the big goals for the shop is growing clientele. They money will be well spent, when you and whomever else is responsible for the backoffice equipment ( in a small group everyone wears lots of hats ) spends your time building the customer base.
There will be lots of folks here who will say, sure go do this, this and this.
Hopefuly, a few will try to influence you as I have, and suggest you use a Cisco grade product, versus Linksys.
I see mostly American sources for parts. Anyone know of good Canadian suppliers?
Not bad on finding some stuff
http://pricescan.com/
...on what you're looking for. I'm no expert on putting together big systems for enterprise environments, so I'll leave that type of reply to others.
However, I do know a great deal about digging around on the surplus market. If you're looking to put together your own servers, perhaps for self-hosting of your Internet presence, you can save tons of $$ by hitting up used-computer stores and electronic surplus places.
As just one example: My former employer (Boeing) retired a number of enterprise-class servers a few years back. Among these was a Compaq ProLiant 6500, tricked out with triple Pentium Pro 200 CPU's, twin redundant power supplies, a RAID controller, two-port Ethernet card, and the front-panel diagnostic display.
That system probably had a five-figure price tag when it was first sold. I picked it up for about $150, and spent another $100 or so on enough nine-gigger drives to create a RAID-5 stack. I added on another external RAID bay, with drives, for about another $100, and had one heck of a reliable FTP archive and database system for less than $400.
At the risk of Slashdotting my own site, I've got listings of electronic and computer surplus places in California, Oregon, and Washington up at this link.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
No, seriously.
Ever since I saw a story here about Lego case mods, I've been building my RAID array enclosures completely out of them. Now, I swear by them: cheap and modular.
Duplo will due in a pinch, but they really only work well with larger 5.25" half-height or full-height drives.
HTH
I'm getting such a kick out of this thread. With the exception of drives (always buy those new from whoever pricewatch recommends that day), I basically get all my stuff from bottom-feeding off of eBay. So basically, the rest of you suckers are covering my hardware depreciation for me. Hey, thanks guys. And before you give me shit about what's server class and what's low end, know that I've saturated T3's with performance-tuned celerons funning *bsd. Last year's hardware on OpenBSD trumps next year's hardware on Microsloth. Like they said in Austin Powers, it ain't the size, mate, it's how you USE it!
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Yet another vote for Newegg.
The unofficial
I just recently bought some rack mount equipment from electroseller.com and had a really good experience. The prices were really good and the service was great.
Plus, they have a nice way of showing you what power supplies and rail kits will work with the case that you are looking at.
I called their customer service to ask a question and someone (a real person) picked up the phone on the first ring. Now that's service.
I used ZipZoomFly almost exclusively to build my PC this summer. There's free two day FedEx shipping on tons of stuff, and their prices always seem to be very near or at the top of the list of best-price vendors.
I've never had to return anything to them, so I can't comment there, but do at least check them out next time you're buying PC gear.
This is not an official Fugazi sig.
I build my hardware from LEGO.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Personal stuff - Newegg.
Work - Dell. I have an ancient Poweredge and it was nice to hit the web and find some more scsi drive racks for it. If I had a no-name brand that would have been unlikely.
Also as someone pointed out - remember to factor in your time when considering cost. One phone call to Dell or a trip in the car here, mail order there, oops they sent the wrong part, gotta RMA and return it, plus you gotta work late putting it all together. That adds up quick.
With a large enough trench coat you can fit an entire ATX motherboard!
bhahahahaha. Good delivery, too.
They are awesome and have a massive supply of cases and components. For server cases: RackMountPro.com rocks pretty hard also.
This is actually a pretty good question for students. When I was in school for Computer Networking and Administration the price tracking websites were always useful but it was a pain in the butt some times getting reasonable prices with details on hardware. Sure I could have listed the cheapest website but (if) you want to keep some credibility you can't, you have to pick a credible resource.
ncix is probably the best Canadian online store for this sort of thing.
fry's they have a new one in Downers Grove ILL.(Chicago land area),Outpost.com is the online store.Also I seen some old but decent hardware at http://www.greatmidwestcomputershow.com/, this event is cool,hosted at collage of DuPage. Now you my not live in midwest U.S.A., if you live near/in a big city check the shows,also check for auctions,gov. surplus for deals. One last thing, the true first post has a good answer I was adout to give a mod point, posted instead.
Two part answer. First, I really think its a bad idea to hand build a server that you expect to push. I'm not even in IT but I know just from home systems how much downtime can result from one bad part needing an RMA. Even worse is having to do tech support for your friends or family. I highly reccomend you get your server from a reputable vendor. Time = Money and I wouldn't risk all the time that could be lost if something goes wrong.
That said, I was a long time user of Newegg, but I recently started using www.monarchcomputer.com on reccomendation from a friend as they beat Newegg on price in many cases. They've proven reliable so far. Check both sites and see where the best deal is to be hand if you insist on going the DIY route.
Nice to know there are others building their own servers. I wouldn't trust hardware put together by anyone else. It's rare I ever have any problems with my boxen.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Well, I'll probably be in the minority here, but since I don't have a bank account or a credit card, there's a couple local shops I go to for almost everything, component-wise (though I think I did get my last CD burner from WalFart). It's instant retail gratification, they carry most of what I need for a marginal markup, and they can be bargained with in ways WalMart and Office Depot can't. Plus I get to feel all warm and tingly about supporting local merchants.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
I recently built a rack for my home business that stores a few servers and some networking equipment. I used some of the low-end cases as well as their 36U rack on wheels and it has all worked out great. I might have been able to find a better price for the cases, but the rack on wheels seemed great at the time, and I wasn't able to find anywhere else that had the same deal that this place had. My main concern was that I didn't want to be forced to mount the rack into the ground/wall, so getting a nice and sturdy rack on wheels was a priority. Anyways, maybe worth checking out for their racks, or possibly for cases if they have anything specific to your needs.
they're not always the cheapest, but they are almost always near the cheapest.
:-(
their shipping is almost always excellent (order friday morning, get it monday afternoon) and inexpensive shipping compared to most other vendors. they must have some sweet deal with their shippers. newegg's return policy is stellar. they always have a good selection of parts in stock.
their online catalogue is really, really good. instead of just regurgitating vendor material, they take the stuff out of the box and photograph it all over so you see exactly what youre getting. afaik the only vendor who does this.
their catalogue browsing is excellent, they let you browse/search by everthing a DIY'er would want to know. chipset, memory speed, form factor, manufacturer, etc.
a lot of products have user comments and ratings, which can be helpful. a lot of other online vendors ripoff newegg's user comments/ratings, which is amusing.
newegg is one of the best online retailers, if not the best period. highly recommended. online vendors could learn a lot from newegg. it's sad that companies as excellent as newegg are very rare.
I've setup a couple servers from Penguin Computing and have been ecstatic with the results. Pricing out server-specific components really doesn't save money and you get a nice warranty with a system. And the racks I bought from Penguin were top-notch. When I did have a hardware problem (which wasn't their fault), they replaced the hardware instantaneously and we never even had downtime.
Time is money and they saved me a bunch of both.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Was the parent being funny? I just got back from Best Buy. I can't wait to try my UPS with my laptop. I just can't afford to lose anything I'm working on if the power goes off.
I buy the bulk of my parts from monarch computer, since they are located in my home state [local pickup for unpatient folks like me] and have pretty good prices, and the rest from newegg. :-)
42
If you're just trying to experiment, maybe Virtual Server 2005 (or Virtual PC 2004) might reduce the number of boxes that you need.
...from my Slashdotting insurance.
Then why does www.phpconsulting.com appear covered with ads for rackspace? If I recall correctly, they are managed hosting... that is, the provide the box and either you or they provide the OS.
The key point of the above being: they provide the box.
eh?
--
wwjd? jwrtfm!
I used to build machines from price watch, but replacement costs and price made me switch to buying used dells on eBay. I always replace the drives throught price watch though...and sell the original drives.
We've been buying our "medium-end" hardware, such as dual-processor Athlons. Liked it better before Google made them change their name from GOOGLEGEAR...
I have shopped with them for years and, being in the ATL area, I love their retail offering: you can actually *go* there and get things.
Now, I have "called ahead" to get things picked from the warehouse and have arrived before they were picked and had to wait a few (30?) minutes, but it still beats the daylights out of even next-day shipping.
This is for personal purchases, friends / family. For work-related purchases, we are a Dell shop from laptops to server. 'Nuff said.
As a young IT professional in a new business, I had lots of time and very little money. Thus, getting a used P2 on E-bay and coaxing it into a reliable system (this is a few years ago) was worth it. Any problems would affect only the few clients I had, and I had plenty of time to look for problems.
However, things change. Now, with a quite successful business, I don't have time to spend coaxing the last bit of performance out of an old AMD K6-2 system. Now, I'm looking for something to work quickly, and well. If I have to come back to it very often, it gets replaced. Quickly.
Now that hundreds of users' time is on the line, paying a bit extra is money well spent.
So, don't ask about the hardware, ask about your actual needs? If you are small/new, get cheap equipment and get valuable experience keeping it running. If you are successful/established, get the more expensive, high-quality stuff that will preserve the good name you've worked hard to earn.
Personally, I refuse to work without an N*2 arrangement, with a redundant network. In other words, if *EVERYTHING* were to fail, I could STILL restore full service in a few hours. That includes the city of San Francisco being leveled by a thermonuclar device, which would shut me down for about 4-6 hours. In most cases, I have THREE degrees of "fallback" before things are truly "dead".
What's cheaper? Downtime for your clients, or server equipment? It's a simple value equation.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Our job is to keep the services serving.
So we get equipment that is designed for that purpose, with overnight delivery of replacement parts and 24 hour tech support.
I prefer leasing servers for 3 years because that's usually how long the various fans, power supplies and disks will last.
Losing a server in the middle of the day is just about one of the worst things that can happen for a consultant.
Your client loses all their work/data since their last backup.
So, you take every precaution you can to ensure that that will not happen. And leasing the machines means a small monthly payment and brand new machines in 3 years (which you will be paid to install/migrate to).
Don't ever risk your client's work or data.
As the parent post implies, hardware that could manage your workload a year ago will still be able to manage the same load next year. Most servers are far overpowered for their workloads in various respects.
However, if the demands on your system increase, you may find that buying yesteryear's hardware on eBay to replace the used hardware you bought a year ago can be more costly in both time and money than buying new kit and keeping it for a few years.
North East Peripherals in Aberdeen.
i on=aboutus
http://www.neponline.co.uk/customer/help.php?sect
It was about 3 doors up from my flat.
There has to be something said for comodity hardware. Sure it doesn't have 24x7 support, and will (not might) fail more often, but you can't beat the price. For many jobs 3 or 4 comodity 'servers' can take the place of one expensive server and eliminate a single point of failure. If it works for Yahoo (zawodny.com) and Google (pcworld). If building up a box is beyond the scope of your IT guy maybe you need a new one who can do more than call Dell when it breaks.
http://www.2cpu.com/
Lots of server components review, and the forums are full of smart cookies when it comes to uptime and performance.
I'm seeing a lot of BS from people who are either saying "Don't risk it, blow your money on expensive computers from Big Blue" or "Don't be a fool, get the cheapest thing you can find; it's all the same." Both are, at least partially, wrong.
Expensive doesn't always mean better. SCSI hard drives are wonderfully fast, but compared to high-end SATA drives which perform on par with the SCSI drives, they're terribly overpriced. "Servers" from a major OEM are similar. Dell is the worst about this, using a shoddy Intel board that doesn't even fully meet ATX specs, making replacing the motherboard with anything other than a Dell provided board difficult. (I'm not even going to bother arguing about how long it takes Dell to move its ass on fixing an obviously broken system with their "It's not a bug, that's a feature" mentality).
And cheaper isn't always the same. I forget which model, but DLink currently has one model NIC that is actually several different NICs, each with different chipsets, all marketed under the same name and model number. They're all steaming piles of shit that you can get for $5 to $10.
Best way to do it is to shop around. Think about what you want to build, what you need, and start looking online for configurations that match what you need. Look for reviews of the equipment. Shop around for the best prices.
Now, you mention that you work for a consulting firm. As some one who does that himself, let me tell you about my experiences as an OEM of desktops, workstations, and servers. It's fantastic, but there are some catches.
1- Don't buy from the rock-bottom cheapies. Find places that are offering decent hardware at a good and fair price and shop them. Those are the places least likely to shaft you and work with you, particularly on large orders.
2- Look for wholesalers in your State. Thankfully I'm from God's country (Georgia for all you heathens out there) and there are plenty of these types of people in Atlanta. A wholesaler will typically assign a salesman to you who you can call up and place orders with, handles all your changes, RMAs, etc. They will typically offer up to 1-year warranties on hardware regardless of the manufacturer's warranty. Good selection, great prices. You can't beat 'em.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
I'm lucky to live in the same city as Directron, HOUSTON, and they have the best prices and almost everything I need! If they don't have it then I go to New Egg, but Directron is my first stop, then if they have it I just drive over during my lunch-time, play a few games on one of the many PC game systems that have around while I wait for my parts.
When needs are at large and money is in short, (which for me they always are)
Ebay.
Although used parts always lack any form of support, I really don't need it anyway
I graduated from my tech support days years ago...
~You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because I'm insane~
I'm sure as hell not gonna get it, but this ebay item seems like a steal...e wItem&cate gory=56106&item=5742501029&rd=1
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi
I wish I had somewhere to put it all...
In order of preference..
1. Newegg
2. ZipZoomFly
3. Fry's (if I absolutely need something right now, cant wait for shipping)
Stay away from:
Best Buy, Buy.com (check out reseller ratings for why).
I've actually managed to stop shopping at Best Buy. I'm going to test out how much I can push them in May when I get a big screen, surround sound system, etc. If they dont give me an outstanding deal (read: make them sell it to me at cost or very small profit margin), I'm going to Ultimate Electronics (cant go to Circuit City since they dont carry Mitsubishi TVs).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
. . . build lots.
Seriously. I don't care how good of a system you buy, someday something *will* go wrong and it'll go bottom up. If that's the only server you bought you're now down for the count.
On the other hand, if you bought three much cheaper commodity servers, then even if two of them go down you can probably still keep *something* going. Same basis as RAID.
Anybody who makes the assumption that good quality components means they won't melt down is setting themselves up for disappointment - and if they're lucky, it won't lead to severe financial problems.
Redundancy is king.
(Of course, in some cases, it's not practical - but I'd always choose it over individual part quality if possible. And as your scale goes up, it gets more and more practical.)
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Don't skimp FFS!! These are servers. I usually buy the IBM xSeries as IBM Australia gives me a 3hr wait for an IBM tech to come on-site - 24x7.
I also have everything set up redundantly (eg SCSI RAID5, redundant power supply) and as well sell enough of these things, we can keep a model spare in the workshop for failover if things are that important.
In Australia, we're small enough that word of mouth can destroy a business.
We've been around for 15 years now...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Am I the only one who think Tom's Hardware is completely biased (pro-intel, pro-nvidia). I remember reading reviews where AMD dominates all but video editing and they call it even. I've stopped reading their stuff a while ago, so maybe they fixed it (doubt it though).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I've repeatedly been dissappointed by server hardware for multiple reasons.
1. The hardware is nonstandard. OS's are more geared towards standard hardware. Having to boot with a custom or proprietary floppy or CD to be able to read a hard drive isn't fun.
2. The hardware isn't available for very long, making replacement a support headache. [I.E. by the time you need it, it's not available or very expensive.]
3. Server hardware is expensive, and usually comes with features you never use
4. Proprietary drivers for special hardware often suck more than the open-source counterparts that are first made for desktop hardware
As such, I stick with desktop motherboards + processors.
My favorite way to choose hardware is to download the Linux kernel source from kernel.org (because I'm going to make custom kernel anyway, lets face it) and look through the driver list to see what hardware is supported. This has repeatedly worked out well compared to simply looking at catalogs and the thinking of "oh don't worry -- it'll work."
For rackmount cases I like Circotech http://www.circotech.com/
If you really need small hardware, though, another favorite is the OpenBrick http://www.openbrick.org/. This is a favorite for firewalls or intrusion detection devices with a flash card as a hard disk. [I haven't used one as a real server with a laptop hard drive yet.]
ASA Computers. It's typically cheaper or only a few bucks more than building from components. It's built, burned-in and has an OS installed.
And it's not Dell. Baby Jesus cries any time you buy a server from Dell. (They look nice at first, but they're such badly architected pieces of crap...)
looks like they are out of business.
website is down, and angry customers are up.
Over time, I have got plenty of juicy stuff, like 40 gig SCSI drives (they make nifty RAIDS), slick COMPAQ server chassis (it's a bitch to fit a motherboard in those, though), and plenty of motherboards perfectly suitable for servers or even LTSP clients. Too bad that video monitors are not available (they use them for the test stands)...
* * *
Oh, and some 15 years ago, I got a dot-matrix 24-pin printer that his tech was not able to fix; "If you can fix it, it's yours". So I plug-in the printer, turn it on and the print head bangs into the side.
Aha! I say. I open the cover, see a fleck of paper in the home optosensor, blow on it, close the cover, and initiate the self-test. Perfect print.
Voil*, printer fixed, it's mine.
My friend was mad, but a deal's a deal. He wanted to give me a job on the spot, but I declined, so his tech's job was fine. I hear he got his ears really rubbed after I left with the printer...
malabs
ingram micro
d and h
dell
and i like these guys for price and warranty too
http://www.ztgroup.com/
Quality.
Cheap.
Fast (as in time to creat/deliver)
Pick any two.
A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body.
I shop at cunt fuck dick suck.
I don't even recommend building your own desktops for a business environment, though I can see why some people would do it. But when it comes to something critical like a server, especially if it is likely to be around for 4-5 years (as most servers are), then it's gotta be from one of the big boys (HP, Dell, IBM, etc).
The biggest reason is that if you buy a server from one of these guys, you know that you're buying a reliable, fairly stable platform that will be supported throughout it's useful life. I personally use all HP servers, and if I have a hardware failure I know that I can make a 10 minute phone call and have an engineer onsite with a replacement part in 4 hours. If I roll my own, I may have to do some troubleshooting with a number of different component manufacturers, especially if there's any finger pointing going on. With HP (or any other big manufacturer), there's one number to call and no fingerpointing.
Also, the big three vendors tend to be better able to do troubleshooting than a number of smaller vendors. I know that HP includes software for management and monitoring with their servers. I have been saved from major downtime on multiple occasions because Insight Manager has detected an imminent failure and I was able to preemptively replace the failing component. So in that sense they are also better supported than a roll-your-own solution. When you're talking about storage systems, EMC goes even further with their call home monitoring/support system.
Finally, the major vendors all perform compatibility testing on their platforms. If you buy a server pre-built from any of the big three, you can generally choose from a number of different flavors of Windows, UNIX, or Linux and know that the server is compatible and supported on that OS. If HP releases a new driver for a fibre channel HBA you know that it won't cause problems with their SCSI HBAs. If you roll your own, you have to do all of the footwork and compatibility testing yourself.
If I need a new server, I have basically two options:
1. Go to a big three vendor, spend 10 minutes configuring it online, and place the order. I can have the server shipped to me and even receive it the next day if I want. All I have to do is unpack it, rack it, and install my applications.
2. Shop around for parts, comparing reviews and prices, and hopefully come up with a config that I can use. Then order the parts from one or more vendors. Then wait for all of the parts to arrive, because the odds of everything shipping and arriving on the same day are pretty slim. When everything arrives I have to make sure that I have all of the drivers available, and then assemble the server. Then install the OS and necessary drivers, hoping that there aren't any compatibility or configuration problems to be solved. Finally I can install apps and rack it.
In business, time is money. Option one takes less than an hour of my time from placing the order to server up. Option one also is far less likely to cause me to lose uptime or cause other headaches from a support standpoint. Option two may save me a couple bucks upfront, but in the long run it's going to cost me far more. Option two is especially bad if a part fails and that particular model is no longer manufactured.
There's a popular saying in the computer industry that goes "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." There's a reason that it's true, and it extends to the other big manufacturers as well.
Just recently a new piece of software was released called Activshopper: www.activshopper.com. It's a toolbar that comes up only when your web browser is on a webpage with a product. It automatically searches for the cheapest price then comes up with the results in the toolbar.
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Why was that load of crap given a +2?
> No, you provide the link.
OK, so you just admitted to the world that you don't know how to use Google. If you had taken the three seconds to do a search on "newegg refurbished fraud," you'd see over 700 pages where most of them discuss their dishonesty.
We got ripped-off on 48 Asus A7V600 motherboards that they sold. I don't think they were refurbished, but not a one worked out of the box. The 48 replacements we bought from someone else all worked. Newegg refused to provide a RMA #, and when we shipped them back anyway, Newegg claimed to have never received them. I still don't know what legal action we're going to take. We're currently interviewing for a new company lawyer, so we will do something in the near future.
...is that many IDE/SATA/etc drives are the same drive as the SCSI model, just with a different interface board.
eg, you are getting exactly the same hardware as the 900% more expensive SCSI drive, but with just a tad slower interface and maybe shorter warranty. for the same price you could buy several of the non-SCSI model drive and keep spares in the closet (or throw them in a raid configuration) and still save money.
Between these two sites I keep a big business (living in the shoes of a small one) running smoothly. My tricks... - Invest in a quality UPS (not only gives high uptime but with line conditioning...even cheap parts work well with clean power) - At least RAID-1 with a quality controller (I know at anytime...24 hours a day if an array member goes south) - Test, test, test. If you're building your own boxes take the time to push the hardware in a lab before it gets pushed in production. Prime95 anyone? ;-)
I have one server from the "big guys"...and that's only because they do good on 1U boxes (although I built a hot spare for my $3500 HP with $400...).
When I order parts, I order from Newegg. Let me share a quick story. I built a computer for my friend, and ordered all the parts from newegg. The was some damage during shipping, and the case window and door were broken.
I didn't want to send it back because it's too much hassle. I called Newegg, and they sent me the parts I needed for free, even though it was not their fault or responsibility. They could have told me to go talk to Fedex (it was insured), but they didn't. Their customer support is great!
As far as getting server systems though, don't build them. It's not worth the time. If you need something cheap, check out Dell or HP. They have some lower end servers for good prices.
Those who have been around for a while know that bits and pieces in a box *can* live for as long as a beautifully crafted industrial strength server device. They also know that if the time of the user community for the services the device in question provides is worth anything, the price difference becomes irrelevant the first time you have an outage. What happens when a part breaks and you cannot find a plug-replacement? Or when you have to spend hours ripping the thing apart to replace said bit?
In my part of the world, if one of our HP/Compaq servers dies, a phone call to the warranty centre results in a replacement arriving almost before you put the phone down. If it is a disk, or a power supply, or a fan (which seem to be the most problematic bits), the redundancy you built in will keep the box running until you can bring it down (if you have to) to replace the dead bit.
Bottom line: If you're supporting a business, do them a favour and do it properly (or like Google does it with massive redundancy of cheap stuff).
With Newegg jacking everyone for exorbitant per-item shipping costs now, there are many other online stores that'll do free or combined cost shipping. You know precisely when Newegg sold out; it was once you started to see the "new look" ads popping up all over the place. Once the leader, now a hollow shell of its former self.
I bought a low cost Bow Technology 1U server case and in less than a month the PSU died. Since I'd gone through NewEgg, I figured it'd be nice and easy. I called up, they said they'd be happy to let me just send in the PSU (there's no way I'm shutting down my business over a PSU and had already put a temporary ATX PSU in it's place). 2 Weeks later I hear nothing from them. They had told me to ship the PSU next day and they'd next day the replacement. I checked the RMA and it turns out they're expecting an ATX PSU for some reason. I pointed out the error and after multiple phone calls they finally changed the RMA but still no PSU. Now they want the whole case. I tell them no way and they give me some lie about not having the case in stock anymore (meanwhile the site clearly states the cases will be in stock in a couple days).
Short story we call the Better Business Beurau. NewEgg pulled some shinanigans and got the BBB to close the case as "customer satisfied." Uh, no I'm not. So we call the BBB and tell them we're not at all satisfied as we've got no refund and no PSU.
NewEgg finally pulls their head out of their butt and refunds the entire cost of the case. I had also got the shipping costs refunded for shipping the PSU to them. What's really pathetic is that we called Bow Technology and they had no idea what NewEgg was doing as BT is more than happy to eat the cost of the PSU. NewEgg had zero reason to try to give me the shaft. It wouldn't cost them a dime to replace the part.
NewEgg lost well over $100 on that stupidity alone and I've never bought another part from them. That was over a year ago. Fortunatly my ISP was really cool and allowed my colocated server to run with the top off and an ATX PSU towering over it. Other ISPs would not be so kind.
NewEgg may be nice when things go right but when things go wrong they're idiots. I've found that's the case with quite a few companies.
They're barely off my shit list only because they gave me more than I wanted (I just wanted the PSU), but I'll have to exhaust other options before shopping with them again. This entire episode lasted 3 months and didn't affect me at all. My server was only down from the time the PSU died till I put in the ATX PSU which was only a span of about 2 hours.
Work Safe Porn
Half the posters recommend buying Newegg, the other half say IBM(or other server manufacturer).
The question that they should both pose to the OP is whether you want to make manufacturing a part of the business. Unless the numbers are very small, building time-efficently becomes most important, and this means an scale(and investment) larger than what idly browsing through Newegg and assembling components on ones' own each day can provide.
There ARE companies that have made profit out of castaway hardware - though I don't know if they specifically build servers as well as low-cost desktop machines. Building your own is a venture that could substantially affect the direction of the company, and if you want to try it, start small and see how much it's costing you.
Since about 1998, I've been dealing with MultiWave for parts at home and work. Prior to that I used multiple vendors. Always had an excellent experience with Multiwave. I picked out the hardware and had my staff assemble our workstations and servers and except for a bad Adaptec RAID card (which we RMAed), had zero problems with server hardware.
Had some problems with the Shuttle SV24 and SV25 boxes - mostly power supplies and overheating. But Shuttle made good on the warranties and we switched to another standard for all new workstations.
I've found that it's best to develop a relationship with a single decently priced vendor that's not going to give you shit when you need to RMA something or get a batch of bad drives. I've found MultiWave to be that vendor for me. I don't work for 'em and don't earn a dime from 'em. I've spent about a half million dollars with them over the years and have been happy.
I've also found that roll your own is best. Every major vendor I've dealt with has been shitty. Do some due diligence - put together 3-4 different workstations (different mixes of reliable whitebox hardware) and test the hell out of them. Run them through the wringer, pick out the best of the lot and buy a zillion of them. It doesn't really matter what you standardize on as long as you standardize and it's reliable.
Anyway, it's worked for me.
Tigerdirect has been fabulous since i started using them 4 years ago. They have rebates...yuck..but their prices are pretty cheap anyways, their return policy is a little better than average, and I cant say anything about their support, cuz ive never had a problem! You kindof have to hunt for the great deals...ie once i found a gig of high performance brand new ram (actually 2 512 sticks bundled) for 170 some dollars, and that was almost a year ago!
my blog
I always type up all the personal information rebates demand and then staple all the pieces together. This way it's entirely readable and impossible to lose except as a complete package.
I've yet to not get a rebate using this method.
"I didn't think that would actually work (I was just very irritated), but I got my rebate a week later."
Companies that understand that pissed off customers should not be ignored are quite rare. NewEgg tried to screw me and then ignore me and it cost them almost $200 on that incident alone and nearly a blackmark with the Better Business Beurau. I havn't ordered anything from them since which is well over a year now. I don't think twice about warning people about them either.
Work Safe Porn
www.pogolinux.com
This is my favorite server vendor. I got a server for home because they are cheap and good, and local.
I used to work for a small web company. We built servers from scratch (tigerdirect). I told the CTO that my servers were going to be built by someone who actually tests the software on the hardware. Guess what? My cheap $2,000 system beat the pants off of the other servers people put together because the hardware was actually compatible. Sure, it cost about 10% more, but it was faster, more server-room-friendly. When we had a problem with it, the answer was a phone call away. It was nice being able to focus on software rather than hardware for a change. I felt a tremendous burden drop from my shoulders after that experience.
That's the last time I ever cobbled together a system. I'm looking at getting one of their desktops for my next upgrade...
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
for work instead of the normal ones we order I can offer one piece of solid advice. DON'T DO IT. I've wasted so many hours sourcing components, waiting for things to arrive, putting it together and burning it in. And after all that I'm still worried about it's stability in the long run!
Do yourself a favour and find a vendor who will take a spec for a server, offer there own expert advice and deliver it on time with a support contract.
Please I beg of you, building a reliable server is not in the same realm as building a gaming pc!
Excellent poster, will reply to again. :)
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I decided I wanted to buy from a local business because it dramatically simplifies the purchasing process, it usually dramatically reduces the wait, and eliminates the "he said, she said" if items paid for don't arrive intact. If I order a system from them, or even just a motherboard, CPU, and RAM, I can see it work before I leave the store.
I like to buy from a small vendor because I figure that Fry's or The Micro Center has plenty of other customers to give them money. They probably haven't even noticed that I don't shop at their stores any more. Not for computer parts, anyway.
I especially like the fact that I can do things like ask for a "3d accelerated video PCI card in the $50 range" and they'll tell me what to buy or I can tell them exactly what I want and if they don't have it stocked, they'll order it for me.
Not that I won't buy stuff from Internet vendors. I've bought stuff at eBay auction and I've wandered through pricewatch, but I don't like the risk in that process. The cost differential between the local store and an Internet store is simply not worth the worry for me. Your mileage may vary.
Your search - "newegg refurbished fraud" - did not match any documents. Suggestions: - Make sure all words are spelled correctly. - Try different keywords. - Try more general keywords.
When it comes to purchasing for customers I go to IBM - it doesn't make much difference if they are going to be using office and IE/firefox if the motherboard is a bit faster and the hard drive is ata not a sata. If it's cheaper and works just as well - why bother. When purchasing equipment for a customer I look at what the customer needs and how I can make it work for him the best way. Most of my customers don't need a raid sata interface or firewire or a bigger pipe to the memory on the motherboard, all they want is to be able to call someone when it's broken and get it fixed. I make more money by consulting and building systems, not spending an hour on installing a motherboard. So I'd get the customer a IBM, when he calls me and says its broken, I'll tell IBM it's broken and let them send a technicihan to fix it. What good is it for a customer if he has a the newest fastest sata drive if he has to wait 3 business days for it to get replaced.
Target.
Trash cans... corporate offices nearby.
So, so true. Dell has, actually for a business' budget really good pricing on their servers. You can get a 2-way P4 for under 2 grand that fits in 2U's..
Of course, it's a hot little bastard, but still
just thought i'd pimp my favorite server vendor. we've ordered about 10 boxes from them and have been happy with each one. their prices are pretty good, too.
A $25/hour employee is shopping for harddrives. He needs twenty harddrives. He spends ten hours comparing prices from various vendors. How cheap do the drives need to be to make his time worthwile?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
This question is a perfect one for the group. It seams that everyone has one more favorite to add to the listing (though all of mine have been mentioned) making this tread a new start page for finding a good part. Thanks tons for the help.
-Tim Louden
Why Big Blue, of course
Sorry for going OT but i've always wondered 1) wether thats correct English 2) what it exactly means. I mean when it woud say: "Why? Big Blue, of ofcourse." i'd understand the logics behind it, NP. However i've never seen it with that , and that makes me wondering wether i have the correct meaning of it.
Please explain? How does this 'work'? TIA.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
There are 2 arguments here.
1.) buy from big corp since its a server and time is money.
2.) build your own. Its cheaper and the support contracts are a joke on commercial systems.
My 2 cents are this
Estimate how much a downtime will cost the business? I know it depends on what the server is doing and the kind of business.
If it will shut down the business and cost more than a new server, then spend more bucks on a unit from big corp. Your job will be on the line if you can not fix it or when the owner will wonder why you did not buy the thing from IBM or HP. Remember you built it so its your fault if it goes down.
Remember parts are a b*tch to deal with, and Especially proprietary raid controllers. If your obsolete raid controller dies ALL DATA IS LOST. Scary. Something you need to look into.
With a brand name system and a support contract they will stock old raid cards and send a tech as soon as possible to get your server back up. Parts are important.
Issues like this are important.
I think an entry level IBM server is only $2500-3000 with a %25 of the cost for a contract. Great deal! Its not that expensive and if it goes down you can point the finger at them.
If your employer can not even afford that then it sounds liek they are in serious trouble and probably wont make it that long.
I support 1.) buying from big corp. Its an investment will worth it. Try IBM if you do this since they have teh most bang for the buck with support and Linux and Windows support. Dell has mixed reliabilty and HP support sucks.
If its just an old box sitting somewhere routing phone calls then dont worry about it and buy a used pc as a backup in case the box goes down. A $300 machine will go nicely. But if its a file server or a machine hooked to a cash register than buy big blue.
My 2 cents
http://saveie6.com/
I just tried it:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 731 for newegg refurbished fraud. (0.08 seconds)"
I can't believe it's holding up so well. No Slashdot effect that I can see. Is that really a G3 iMac?
I also can't believe that front page graphic. Ugh.
I would rather build it myslef than deal with the subpar dell support I receive on my mission critical systems. So NOT even think of buying dell on anything critical as they have NOBODY with the expertise to help you on any critical subsystem (SAN, Tape drives, critical DB servers etc etc.) Their Linux support is laughable...as is their Powervault or EMC SAN support. Run away and buy IBM or Compaq as you are more likely to reach an engineer taht CAN find his ass with both hands and a flashlight. Dell has done pretty well with desktops, but they aren't ready for enterprise.
> Newegg refused to provide a RMA #
We had that problem when we received a bad batch of Antec power supplies from Newegg. We ended-up dealing directly with Antec to get them replaced. Rather than taking a couple of weeks if Newegg had done their job, it took us about 11 weeks to get Antec to replace them.
Don't forget Supermicro - they make excellent server-class components, from motherboards to barebones to complete servers. You can pick parts up used parts from eBay and other used-parts dealers.
;)
If you are going to go cheap and built it yourself from commodity components (not server validated), this is what I recommend: buy as good quality components as you can afford (for example, get an ASUS, Abit, etc. motherboard) and get two of each. This is to cover yourself in case a) the component in question dies and b) it is no longer manufactured down the line when it does die. Certify both sets yourself, if you have a spare case build a standby machine and make sure the same boot hard drive boots in both boxen (I would recommend cold-swap IDE carriers if you're gonna go IDE, they make it easy to swap drives especially in a data center environment where you need to be in & out, and they usually have a fan which aids cooling). M$ operating systems usually have a problem booting on even slightly different hardware, while Linux is usually much more forgiving.
In the end, it depends if this is worth your time as opposed to just paying a company (say, IBM) to deliver the machine and cover it with a service contract. In my case, it is, as I am also the service department, and am paid for it. I offer same-day service as I stock parts that can potentially break, and am intimately familiar with the servers as I am the one who built them.
Also: as someone already pointed out, you can pick up some older hardware that still has plenty of power. For example, a dual Pentium 3 server/workstation-class machine. It may have SCSI and come with a few drives. So you can use SMP kernels and run in RAID mode and learn about these technologies if you're not already familiar with them. When you need more power, just scale the underlying hardware up (say, to a 4-way Xeon 3.2GHz
Must-not-watch TV!
Newegg
8anet, also known as AcmeMicro
Racks And Stands
Sybercom
TechOnWeb
Amazon (I buy a lot through Amazon because I get a referal kickback for links from my website which is nice)
AccuPC
There are a lot more I'm sure but I can't think of all of them off the top of my head. Oh, I have bought from Monarch Computers also. There are some companies I won't buy from eve again. The main one that comes to mind is Computer Giants. Those folks tried to scam me once on a Maxtor hard drive that went DOA in the first couple of days of testing. Like all the people posting complaints about them on ResellerRatings they tried to con me into paying return shipping to send the DOA drive back. They also said I'd have to pay one of their people to test the drive and confirm it was DOA. Otherwise I'd have to pay to have it sent back to me. Most people find that the drives are OEM or used and that they are selling them as new retail. Yeah, they're a bunch of asshats. That's why merchant review sites are so essential to buying on the Internet. You can't walk into an Internet store, get in a manager's face, and demand your money back for the lemon they sold you when you buy something online. You have to rely on other people's experiences to weed out the crooks. Fortunately for me Maxtor was exceptionally nice about the whole thing and took care of replacing out DOA drive with a brand new replacement. Nice folks @ Maxtor.
Anyhow, I don't always buy the lowest price on Pricewatch and Froogle. I'll buy from a company I know it's going to try and screw me even if I have to pay a little more. I always check eBay before placing an order too. Take for example one of my recent eBay purchases. I priced rack-mount patch cable organizer (wire routing gear) on Froogle. I found a decent model by APC for $25/each. I just happened to search ebay before buying and low and hehold I found Leviton cable organizers for $4.99/each. Each! Ha! Needless to say I bought 4 instead of 1. They are also built extremely well. Always check eBay before buying something online. You may find it for half the price (or less!).
I agree with the parent poster.
In many standard business environments, losing customer data in silly ways causes ripple effects across multiple layers and frequently leave wrong kind of impression about your professional readiness. It will also put people working with you or recommending your services in difficult situation. If possible, don't do it, especially for big clients.
Dell/HP routinely offers attrative server deals at very reasonable price. Sometimes, your consulting rate easily is much more than a server, Dell SC420 server with Intel 7221 Server chipset cost only several hundreds USD. If you need more solid server stuff, HP/DELL rackmount units are also available. They are built more rigorously due to space constraint, heat, and expected usage in data center rack for 24x7 operations.
I agree in most parts.
But, where do Dell and Compaq get their parts? They are the exact same parts that you can buy elsewhere. Intel motherboards in the Dells, hard drives from the vendor of the week with the cheapest cost, etc. With bad luck, you even get locked into a motherboard with a non-standard power connector pinout that can't be replaced without ordering from them.
You also mention how bad IBM Deathstars are (were) and then promote IBM as a vendor. What drives did IBM use?
When you use off the shelf parts, you get off the shelf quality, no matter who you buy from. Commodity parts aren't tested well enough these days because all consumers want is a cheap price and testing cuts into the bottom line. Many consumers don't even return bad hardware since Windows crashes so often that nobody can tell if the hardware is intermitent. The few returns hardly offset the cost of testing.
My suggestion is to go with as few off the shelf parts as possible if uptime is needed. Sun is a great example of this.
If you just need a cheap box, multiply the cost by two and plan for redundant systems. They will fail sooner or later.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Canadians have been complaining to them about this for at least 2 years, and they still haven't managed to figure out that fraud is coming from romania and places like that, not Canada or Britain or other places like that.
wanted to provide a firewall with rackmount aluminium chassis to our customers, but the available stuff was too expensive. Got a sheet metal manufacturer to make the stuff but it took a YEAR to get it right. The internals were fairly easy, but the box was very difficult. Even had to get some screws made up...
take a look at the SN300 on http://xnet.com.pk/ for a picture.
Seriously, Dell?? The company I work for has had almost 100% failure on Dell's 1650 blades, Dell finally replaced the last 2 before they died as well. And forget the LTO tape libraries... Our system has been -REPLACED- 3 times and we still get finger pointing between Dell and Veritas as to whose issue it is. I pity any one who buys a Dell. But everyone should know DELL stands for "Dumb Execs Like the Logo", so I guess they are here to stay. I don't know about the servers, but I have found Micron PCs [www.buympc.com] to come with excellent customer service when it comes to warrantied part replacement. Hell it takes as long to get a part replacement from Micron as it does to find competent employee at Dell...
I make very low-end servers for home-based businesses to put up web pages, do IMAP email, backup files to the network drive, etc. I buy the barebone Microtel desktop (not the servers Walmart also sells) units without OS from Walmart.com for $168 to $199 (because I need economic power on my side to get a rock bottom price and a semi-stable product assortment to choose from). With www.clarkconnect.com's RedHat 9 (soon to be Fedora 3) system software, these things run like water heaters. When's the last time you booted up your water heater?
:-)
RAID cards (obsolete LSI Logic Megaraid I4s) come from www.ebay.com. Hard drives and Zalman CPU fans from www.zipzoomfly.com, extra RAM from 18004memory.
*Note* this is an "underengineering" approach to servers. I delight in using the slowest new processor money can buy. Walmart is a big enabler in selling to a tier of server customers that are in terms of cost and technology, beneath the dignity of "normal" server people. No flames please.
If you just need a cheap box, multiply the cost by two and plan for redundant systems. They will fail sooner or later.
I agree with this. If you build yourself (or get local oem to do it) using commodity parts, you're going to spend a lot less than if you buy a Dell or IBM server. You can then put up two and have true redundancy, and easily obtain parts (or even buy a whole new machine) with no notice.
It's great to have a 24hour replacement policy from Dell or whatever, but that's still 24 hours your mission critical server is down.
For an example, look at google. (apparently they don't even use cases).
Speak before you think
For the past couple years, I've been building servers for my company, and it's really turned into more of a pain than that money is worth (not to mention we've probably lost more money than we saved due to some downtime). My company is really stingy with money (less so now than they were before), and wouldnt give me the money I needed to buy any prebuilt systems, so I would piece together machines. In the end this turned out not to be the best idea due to a few factors.
1) Shipping problems would always come up where they wouldn't send out items until like a week after I bought them.
2) I recieved quite a few parts that were DOA
3) Putting some of the 1U's together was a huge pain, especially trying to find 1U cpu fans for the faster processors
4) hardware would fail, and due to it being about a year and a half since I built the machine, and hardware changing so rapidly recently, It would be hard to find a local store with replacement parts.
I think out of the 9 rackmount servers I built, I've had 5 motherboards fail, 6 sticks of ram, and a power supply (not counting the stuff that was DOA). Most of the failed hardware I would say happened within the first week of the server being online, so I dont know if that should be considered DOA too, but i'm not including it. Anyways I've recently been buying Supermicro servers and couldn't be happier. All the machines I've got from them, and that my friend who recommended them has got from them have been running great, and they're much cheaper than IBM or any other big manufacturer (though if I had the funds I'd rather buy IBM). Anyways, before I quit building my own machines I found a great place to buy rackmount cases which is rackmountmaster. All the cases I've got from them are laid out great, have good air ventelation, and aren't rediculously priced like so many other rackmount manufacturers.
Moderate up. It's funny. Off topic, but funny. We can't always be serious.
I can tell you first hand (I worked in Enterprise Support at Dell) that they try to by the cheapest parts available, just above the will not break line. The 2650 (and its kin) are a perfect example (the 25xx series was bad too). They ended up shipping a pair of PCI nics because the onboard was so much crap. There have been continuous BIOS updates to work around various hardware bugs. There have been stop shipments while new hardware suppliers are found for various chips (because the % of failures got to high... this has to do with the number of support calls you handle, dodging RMA, etc).
Some of the systems are very solid. But how are you going to know this on the outside? The 2450 was very solid (after some BIOS updates), but thats old hardware now.
Of course as long as people keep pushing for lower and lower prices (as a primary focus), the hardware will just keep getting more unrealiable. And the quick replacements of the crappy hardware makes people become numb to to the idea of failures often. Then you have people that switch from Compaq to Dell, because of Compaq failures... and become blind to the Dell problems because of their hate for Compaq issues and a wish for something reliable.
So my vote picking a vendor or build your own goes with... Close your eyes and pick your poison.
Apparently, it costs each retailer who lists 3+ grand a month for upto 99 items so that basically forces retailers to try to include as much stuff in each listing.
This also causes alot of false positive matches when u do a search. Hell, just trying to search for "corsair" memory, u get generics and other non-corsairs.
Because of that, and the annoyance of it, I don't use pricewatch anymore. I use a combination of Pricegrabber, shopping.yahoo.com, and froogle.com in addition to techbargains, and fatwallet.
On the junkyard. Where else?
See pictures of tits
Ask other sysadmins. When we were shopping for a new tape autoloader, I asked some other sysadmin friends who they bought from, and got a nice list. I called for quotes, and even got other recommendation from the companies I called.
We eventually settled on ZZYZX, but we also strongly considered CDWG.
Remember that people networking is as useful as computer networking. :)
You want to minimise downtime therefore you need -
Resilience
Redundancy
Compatibility
If a PSU fails do you have to down the server, no, because you have a server with hot plug redundant PSUs, slide the dead one out and slide a new one in.
If a disk fails do you have to down the server, no, you pull out the hot plug SCSI drive and slide in a new one and let the array rebuild.
If an on board fan fails do you have to down the server, no, you slide the server out of the rack and pop off the top or if floorstanding you remove the side, unplug the failed fan and plug in a new one.
If an array controller fails what do you replace it with, will it detect your disk array? Will it blow away your configuration? My experience is with HP/Compaq, their array controllers are backward compatible, plug in a fresh one, connect the arrays and your original array is back up. With Dell they have different manufacturers of the chip sets on the array controllers so a little more thought is required but the same should apply. With a home brew server you really are going to have to put a lot of effort in to make sure you get the right controller so you can see your data, do you really need that much extra work when under pressure? Is your hourly rate that low that you can't afford a brand name server?
SCSI versus SATA
SCSI disks have a duty cycle of at least 90%, the latest and greatest SATA disks have a duty cycle of 60%, that means that the typical amount of usage per 24 hour period will not exceed those %ages and those disks are guaranteed and sold on that basis, if the disks are used above those figures the lifespan of the disk will be diminished. SATA may be approaching SCSI in many ways but it isn't there yet so for serious server use unless you have multiple redundancy in your raid arrays then it is less than ideal.
The cost of a new server is so low now that in the professional environment it really isn't worth cobbling together some collection of parts. If you are running a test server in your bedroom then maybe.
And lastly, pay for maintenance, let someone else deal with the headache of changing a failed mainboard, the cost of maintenace on these modern boxes is so low you would be foolish not to.
I suspect that you're more likely to get an RMA for a Sony than some generic brand LCD. You do get something for the price premium, and a "perfect" LCD is probably one of them. Remember, in the end, NewEgg has to send the defective LCD upstream, if one manufacturer/distributor won't give NewEgg a refund for a LCD with a few dead pixels, there's not much NewEgg can do -- I wouldn't expect them to take the hit themselves, especially with PC retail margins so low.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For those of you in the UK there are a few cheap online resellers:
. ukt tp://www.overclock.co.uk. co.ukt ore.com
http://www.ebuyer.co.uk
http://www.komplett.co
http://www.scan.co.uk
http://www.dabs.com
h
http://www.overclockers
http://www.cpucity.co.uk
http://www.savas
I personally use ebuyer, komplett and scan most of the time, but the others aren't too bad either. Shipping varies from store to store but some use CityLink which isn't brilliant (ebuyer and cpucity).
George Wright
Have any of you tried the Anandtech price engine? It's like froogle but with less BS it seems.
http://labs.anandtech.com/
Do your research up front and get good hardware. Test the configurations you want to sell. Stick with a limited variety of components/vendors, stock extra, and test everything!
apart from Tottenham Court road , where else can one find reliable components in London?
Wanted : A Signature.
... I will fire you.
It is that simple.
Services, even in companies with tight budgets, should be fully redundant and resilient.
That is the cost of doing business, meet the costs or go out of operation, I will not care if you are sourcing the parts from IBM's support or from you friend with the small shop around the corner (well, I will care, but services are first, we can periodically check if we are getting the better deals around).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you're making decisions based on product reviews, carefully compare those reviews. THG's 5 Jan 05 review of the Antec Aria micro-ATX case is so flawed that I suspect that they dry-labbed it ... never had the product in hand.
The reviewer said one had to pull the PS to install the mobo. Not true, my D865GLC (with P4 attached) slid right in (In the recent O'Reilly Building the Perfect PC book, those authors elected to pull the PS for convenience ... did the THG reviewer mistakenly lift the idea from that source?)
More importantly, the THG review stated that the Aria case only had room for two drives, one full size and one 3.5. I have an Aria case with two 3.5 hds and one optical on board and room for one more hd. A casual inspection of the drive tray or the manual (available online at antec) shows that the design supports one full size (usually optical) and three hds.
Tom's is entertaining, but I'm no longer certain that it's informative.
Well, here goes, (flame on everyone). I work in a hosting environment where the demands on CPU are low and storage is high. I don't need the whizziest new processor in my NOC to do a great job for my clients. I stick with one platform (Dell Poweredges in my case) and I began purchasing on ebay. I now have a very good relationship with one vendor, I pay about one quarter of what a new server would cost, I get a 30 day warranty from the vendor (and we torture test the machines for about a week upon receipt) and I have a NOC full of quad processor, Raid5, redundant servers that I am very happy with and which do the job quite well. Not only that, but replacemnt parts are a snap to buy direct from Dell.
I had a very nice guy at best buy listen carefully to the crazy problems I was having with my Athelon 64. He suggested a few fixes of which I had already tried, then he asked if I had tested my homes electrical system to make sure that it could handle the 2 routers, 2 monitors, laptop, two pc's and other assorted electronics in my office. When I said I hadn't he recommended getting the cheapest battery backup there since I didn't really need the battery backup, and see if having the power regulated helped. Sure enough, it fixed my problem, and made me feel like an idiot for not thinking of it myself. I would have offered that guy a position at my company if I hadn't filled all of my open positions, because he was friendlier, more resourceful, and generally helpful than most of the folks my boss has been digging up to hire. Granted I agree that most of the computer guys there are know-nothings who have a pretty good line of bs to offer up, there are always a few gems if the dirt pile is large enough.
Cept if 24 hours of being down will put you out of business you might want to make sure that hot backup server is in another data center in another town. Other than that pla is right on.
They've been showing their age and I plan to replace them with headless iMacs. I'm at a university, so we ought to be able to get them for $300-400 each with the educational discount. That's a pretty good deal for a brand new OSX box.
Since my own servers have been running on Sparc for years, I'm only replacing one Sparc with another. I find them when somebody else throws them out. One of them servers initially run on a Sparc10, then two another Sparc10s, then an Ultra1, then an Ultra5, and now on a E250. Apart from the E250 which I got from Ebay, all others came from People or Universities who threw them out.
Debian on Sparc rocks. Only the stock-kernels sometimes suck (Linus and others have a tendency to break them for Sparc since they don't run Sparcs themselves).
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Economy of Scale
L
I think there's a strong argument that doing assembly and testing of your own hardware simply costs more (when you factor in man-hours) and simply leaves you with a less reliable product, with no recourse when things go bad. I've talked about this in detail before, at least in terms of building gaming PCs, but I believe the same arguments apply to professionally-targeted server hardware. Of course there are people who will disagree with me because "building your own server is fun." But fun isn't why businesses deploy machines, generally.
What's even better about ebay, once you find a good vendor, you can keep an eye on their other auctions, or just purchase from them directly. One terminal server I purchased for an excellent price. I asked if he had more for that same price, and he sold me several more. He even had memory for 25% of market price for the servers.
True, but it all boils down to what "budget" you have. Currently, I work in a rather small office with a satellite in another state.
While, I wouldn't waste my time building critical servers (Dell is always nice), there are a lot of things that you can always scale back on. Cisco vs. Linksys is roughly equivalent to the Caddy vs. Hyundai (I own a Hyundai). Once is not necessarily more robust/stable than the other, and in fact sometimes you can get "taken" on higher stuff. I've had very good luck on lower end switches that I've done my research in. It goes back to another poster's comment, that doing your cost-analysis and a little research ALWAYS pays off.
Sig it.
I ordered some cheapo video card for my GF's computer a while back. I ordered a particular model as it supported a DVI monitor, and it supported DirectX 8.
:) I go away pretty damned satisfied.
It arrives, and it turns out that the DVI port is just for decoration. Ah, those evil Taiwanese. So I call Newegg.
It takes a bit of arm twisting, but I tell them that I want to return that card for one that supports both DVI and DirectX 8, and the same amount of memory. It can be cheaper, or it can be more expensive. That's what I want.
They send me a card that costs 3x as much
JH
The day begins thusly. .
Pick up a copy of the two or three free weekly computer papers distributed all over the city. These papers have a handful of articles on PC related stuff. Ignore those. The meat of the paper lies in the 150 or so adverts placed by small mom and pop computer stores all over the city. They list in 4-point fonts all the components they sell and their current prices for that week.
Go through the papers, price compare, get a feel for where the technology is at, and figure out what you want to build. You can do this either at home, or sitting in a donut or noodle shop at the corner of College and Spadina, THE major intersection for PC parts-buying, a two minute walk from about 15 different computer stores.
Go for a two minute walk. --Some of the shops don't even bother advertising, and most of them are hallway-sized stores with a glass counter, boxes and bags of OEM components, and a couple of asian guys in the back with soldering irons and half a dozen monitors and half-built machines. --Like a scene out of some dorky spy film where the everyman hero knows an ace-in-the-hole guy who can help give him an edge, --or who will look up and say something moronic like, "Whoa, Man! No, you don't get it man! This thing is so far advanced it shouldn't even exist for another two decades! Where did you get this thing, man!?"
Buy your parts. Go home. Build. --All the major parts come with their own manufacturer's warrantees, so if something stops working, get on the web, get on the phone, get your parts replaced. It works, buy one or two generations behind the technology curve and you'll spend about $550 (Canadian dollars) for a kick-ass system. --And be shaking your head at the guy who spent $3000 on a cutting edge Dell package that he'll still be making payments on when you're upgrading a year later to something faster than what he just bought.
But that's Toronto. If you don't live there, you have to work a bit harder. The downside is that you have to live in fucking Toronto.
-FL
I build my own for home use about every 1.5 to 2 years. Since I now live in the middle of no where I've had to resort to buying almost everything online. I've divided my buying into four main areas:
:-)].
;-)
CPU, mobo, and ram I get from zipzoomfly. Great turnaround with the free 2day fedex and excellent prices.
For cases and power supplies I use xoxide.com Great service and they responded very quickly to an order mixup [missing fans].
For raid controllers and enclosures I've been using pc-pitstop.com. Again, great service for an order mixup [missing raid ctrl].
For CD/DVD drives and harddrives I still find myself buying from Bestbuy [yea I know] because I schedule my purchases to match their sales and rebate schedules [take THAT BestBuy
BTW: For home use I haven't bought SCSI since the advent of UDMA100. I already run everything one drive per channel. Now work is a completely different matter.
I disagree.
... the "atta boy" lasts a week but the perception of the "price of IT" changes forever. You may find it difficult to get the all the money you need for other different things in the future.
If you know what you are doing you will spend MUCH less money and get much closer to exactly what you want than if you go with a major vendor.
In my opinion the primary risk of building equipment yourself is the expectations that it creates within the company. When you solve a $7000 problem for $2000
Also it is not a good idea if you plan on leaving for another job anytime soon... especially if you make the mistake of leaving on good terms.
The problem is that your replacement will likely be one of these "Real IT Pros" who's primary skill is calling a vendor under a "Platinum Support Plan" and who is otherwise helpless.
Expect to get calls on your home phone from your old employeer begging you to come in and fix this or that because this "Real IT Pro" monkey-boy can't get the job done.
For true IT class hardware you have to buy from HP or IBM. Maybe Dell if you have no self respect.
DIY hardware just don't have all the hot swap, multi-bus, remote access, hardware sensors, and so on a real IT shop need. Plus the support contracts to meet SLAs.
Now if you building server farms you might get away with whitebox computers and keeping spares around.
These days, we are splitting the difference between rolling our own and buying. We used to be a pretty heavy Sun/SPARC shop (SPARC iron still claims the majority in our data center), but with Solaris 10 for AMD64 coming out, we're buying a lot of Opteron boxes and just running Solaris 9 on the them in the meantime (or Solaris 10 for some experimental stuff).
That said, check out:
Tyan Transport Barebones Systems
Tyan, of course, have been making excellent motherboards for years. These are simply the motherboard and a case, integrated together. Just add disks, procesors and memory.
They've been working great for us.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
In addition to pricewatch, I usually use Froogle for pricing searches.
Are you ready?
it looks like he was...
That would be why I didn't say buy servers at NewEgg. Network equipment is cheap at NewEgg. I use the Supermicro boards for Intel systems, and generally the Tyan boards for AMD systems. Both are top-quality, and are functionally identical to the IBM boards (with the exception to you might use Adaptec or 3ware RAID cards instead of IBM's).
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
buy from Apple, you won't be disappointed
This is exactly why I don't buy products with rebates. Three month interest-free loans to for-profit corporations is not the best use of my (or anyone's) money.
That said - if the OP is going to build his own, he is going to build his own. If that's the case, here is the most important bit of wisdom I have to offer :
Heat Kills.
Computers die for one reason, and one reason only. Heat. I have autopsied well over 100 dead computers (servers, desktops) in the past two decades and with extremely few exceptions the deaths were caused by CPU fan failure (a $10 part), power supply fan failure (a $10 part), or hard drive failure. If I really wanted to push it, I would say the drive failures were heat related, generally due to weak power supply exhaust fans.
Heat kills. It doesn't matter where you buy your parts if you are building your own systems (hey, we all did it early in our careers when money was more scarce than time) then spend the extra eight dollars to get the best CPU fan you can find, get top quality fans pulling air into the machine, and get top quality fans pushing air out of the machine.
Heat kills. Don't overclock your servers, and don't go for the fastest of anything. Insure there is airflow space between your drives and make sure the room your machines are in is cool. Maybe even consider underclocking your CPU - a machine running 80% as fast but giving you an extra two years of uninterrupted uptime is a lot better than a server running 105% and dying at a rate of two hardware failures a year.
If you are hand building, build conservative machines and buy identical spare parts while you still can. Nothing sucks more than having to retire a machine because you can't get spare parts, except replacing a machine because a $10 cheapo fan stopped blowing.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
When my partner and I owned datahive, we used to buy and build all our equipment from Daiwa Distribution here in Calgary.
Just before we sold datahive, we bought all our servers from Dell, as they ended up costing less than the DIY 1u systems we were getting.
Daiwa was a good vendor. Friendly staff, good open return policy and a great special order system for non-stocking items.
For our new project, however, we are using all Apple server hardware.
scott king
he's just trolling, err astroturfing, for Newegg.com.
If you aren't going with HP/Dell/IBM your local shop is as good as any. Often it is better. As far as price goes the few bucks saved through mail order just isn't worth it. If a part fails it is faster and easier to walk into a local shop for a replacement then wait for parts to be shipped back and forth. If the local shop values your bussiness they will give you a temporary replacement while your dead part is shipped back to the supplier. Ofcourse you are going to have to develop such as relationship. Order complete systems from one supplier instead of parts from different places. Have the local shop assemble the systems. That way if there is a problem it is the local shops problem not yours.
Years ago a tech ordered 30 systems worth of parts for workstations. There was a problem: the video card was huge and did no clear some of the components on mainboard. The suppliers didn't care. It was not their problem. While trying to save a few bucks the tech cost the company close to $1000 in restocking and shipping fees, as well as a lot of time.
More recently I was quoted a price for a couple of rackmount systems. When the supplier tried to build the system they ran into a problem with case and the cpu heatsinks. It was not my problem. The supplier had to fix the problem, and they did it on their dime. If I did not have a good working relationship with this supplier the order would probably have been canceled. (At which point I would have taken my bussiness elsewhere.)
Ofcourse if you are a home user it if different. Local shops don't give a damn who you are and you shouldn't care about them.
> But, where do Dell and Compaq get their parts? They are the exact same parts that you can buy elsewhere.
Neg. Name brand servers can have a bunch of monitoring and remote management stuff that is simply not available in the commodity market.
At work we used to buy OEM SuperMicro servers from a local reseller for PC class servers.
Unix was mostly AIX with a bit of Sun Sparc with support provided by IBM or a local Sun reseller.
For PC class servers we initially used Mylex RAID controllers only. They were great boards and great RAID controllers. But a few problems..
a) supermicro server's have a very select list of compatible memory (vendor/model/batch). This added significantly to the cost.
b) Mylex RAID controllers can be temperamental to SCSI timing issues and their driver support does NOT expose RAID events (disk failure) to the host OS.
c) Mylex driver support for OSes other than Windows wasn't the greatest, driver's took many months to come out and usually required a firmware upgrade of the RAID array at the same time. This is fine on a new server that doesn't have any data but it is a big deal when you have a in production server with loads of data. If something screws up in the firmware update you can loose the RAID array, have to restore your data from backup which for large servers means at least a day of down time.
Also, at the time we were buying one class of server for all our server needs.
So we decided to switch to two class of PC servers..
1. Large: Dual/Quad Xeon SuperMicro Servers with Promise Ultratrak RM8000 external RAID arrays.
2. Small: Single P4 + Kingston ECC RAM + Promise IDE software RAID (RAID1) from a local whitebox reseller.
This worked well for a while except..
1. Large Servers:
a) Promise Ultratrak would hard lock when installing Redhat Enterprise 2.1. Something to do with Redhat tweaking the SCSI timings of the onboard SCSI controller (connects to external RAID) to suppport clustering. This was fixed by Promise with a firmware update about 14months after we encountered this problem.
b) WesternDigital's Accoustic Management would cause the Promise to timeout a drive causing the array to go critical, causing a rebuild to the hotspare, slowing the array down (50%) for 10+hrs (RAID 1+0 of eight 200GB disks). This was fixed about 8months later with a fix from western Digital.
c) The PRomise RAID array would not properly handle failed cached writes to disk, causing either corruption or drive to be mark bad (instead of marking the block bad and remapping it). Without disk caching enabled the performance of the Promise RAID array sucks.
2. Small:
a) Promise IDE RAID card (software RAID) was not supported well on most OSes except Windows. Their Linux driver left a lot to be desired.
b) One time we installed an Adaptec 2940UW scsi card (something we had lying around) to attach a local tape drive. Initially it worked great for a few months then the card started to die; the server would intermittenly reboot without any cause. We lived with this for a few months (all the time riding the local reseller's ass) until finally the card die gloriously, taking the motherboard and power supply with it. I have to give props to the reseller (Cybex Systems Inc. in Vancouver, BC, Canada), they were more than understanding and replaced everything in ASAP (sameday).
After all these problems it was decided we needed a top-tier name brand for our servers. After an RFP we decided on Dell; they were the cheapest by 20%, a local parts depot (this is important), their 4hr warranty was target for completed repair not just response (what HP/IBM have) and most importantly other companies provided a favourable recommendation.
Has it been great?
Well not exactly..
Two of the first few servers we purchased were for a two node Linux webserver setup where replication software would keep the two server's filesystems insync. On the Dell PowerEdge 2650, the embedded RAID controller is an Adaptec (some variation of single channel Ultra160 family). Unfortunately, adaptec controller's have many hardware defects that the driver has to compenstate for (most hard is like this, some more than others). With the replication software installed, within a
This sig space tolet, reasonable rate.
I'm one of many here, I'm sure, going through hell with a custom-made server. A guy in our group recommended building one--most power for the least money, right? Yeah, except that we can't get the motherboard's crappy 3rd-rate SATA working under Linux. Oops. Spending a grand more on an XServe would have had us up and running two months ago. But, of course, now that the money has been spent, the only option is to make it work. *sigh.*
Don't worry about cranking every last erg out of a certain box. Like on ours--who gives a shit if SATA can serve up X% more pages per hour than plain ATA? Right now it's serving zero pages per hour. The Deskpro PIII I have in my closet on DSL is currently kicking the crap out of this piece-of-shit box that is still in pieces at some dude's house. It's not like we're ever gonna come close to that theoretical limit, anyway. If you're never gonna do more than 100 MPH, what does it matter if a Ferrari will go 205 MPH and and a Lamborghini will only do 202? You'll save money in the long run if you just get something good that works. Put down the Tiger Direct catalog and call a real vendor.
Remember: Cheap clients get desktops with Linux and lots of hard drives. (Last week CompUSA had 160 GB 7200 RPM Maxtors for $70, no rebates or nuthin'.) Rich clients get real servers. There is no in-between. If some loser douchebag wants an 'enterprise-level SAN' for his 3-man telemarketing firm, tell him to go screw.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"In each case, various servers and external storage enclosures are needed on the cheap that will be pushed to their limits."
Would you buy the cheapest car you could and push it to its theoretical limits? The only way to be good, cheap, is to go cheap and redundant. 3 Linux boxes chock full o' drives will be better than one "high-performance" 1U box you built on the cheap. An XServe will be better than either.
If your Ars-recommended gaming rig goes out for a couple of days, who cares? On the other hand, if a small company's one-and-only file/print/web/mail/ server goes out...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Dept. of Libel: Drew Carrey Killed A Guy Then Paid To Cover It Up"
They don't seem to have much super-big iron, but we're running just about our entire freaking company on a dual-Athlon machine we got from them, with an SATA RAID and 4G of RAM. It's a solid machine. Oh, and they're cheap.
One last note of particular interest to the /. community is that they have pretty good Linux presence -- I think you can buy SuSe or Redhat machines pre-installed, and they have no problems selling a machine with no OS whatsoever.
Of course, when you compare them to a monster like Newegg, they don't have the selection. But if what you want is not particularly unusual, Monarch's a pretty good choice.
6. Audible Alarm (not shown)
-from a Cuisinart product owner's manual.
I have always had very good luck with Sun servers that have been refurbished at anysystem.com. The "Ugly Duckling" specials are great as I really don't care what they look like as long as they work. Great Sun hardware at literaly a fraction of the price sounds like a qimick, but I've never had an issue.
Join the Linux Generation. #LinuxGeneration on EFnet Linux Counter #249871
After having a bunch of boxes from "tier 1" server vendors die, getting visits from idiot service techs, and still having trouble getting parts, we started rolling our own servers. We save several thousand per server, even assuming $100/hr for a tech to order and assemble it all. Warranties on individual components are typically as good or better than the tier-1 vendors, and the components are best-of-breed. (Even tier-1 vendors use the cheapest disks they can get in any given week).
I've had very good expieriences with server building blocks from Supermicro. We then add on CPUs, good Kingston memory, Seagate disks, and Adaptec or LSI RAID cards. For storage enclosures, we typically go with Storcase.
All of the above vendors have been in business a long time, and offer backwards-compatibility in most of their producs (this is especially important with the RAID cards). The final products are bulletproof beasts that last longer, on average, than any of the x86 HP, Dell, or IBM servers we've owned.
If down-time is that critical, then you should be running redundant clustered systems. This way your server is ALWAYS available even if one goes down.
Dell overnights me parts - plenty of time to recover one node in a clustered system.
The parts guarantee ensures that my server investment will last 3 years. A server built around parts that won't be available next year can not give you the same guarantee.
-ted
I would like to add that if you teach your IT staff to understand all of the small considerations that must be taken into account when putting a PC together piece by piece, they will generally better understand how to troubleshoot and research problems. I've found this intangible benefit to be invaluable, but this is simply my exerience and opinion. Thanks to all that have replied. I truly appreciate the suggestions.
- Have you ever noticed that the more you learn about technology, the more stupid you sound trying to explain it?