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White Box, Or Big Names for Lower-End Servers?
LazloToth asks: "Those of us who manage small- to medium-size networks face the decision all the time: for the run-of-the-mill web, print, or storage server running on i386 architecture, should we buy HP or Dell, for example, or build it ourselves from commodity hardware and save some bucks up front? In my operation of fewer than 50 servers, one will see a mix of the two. For servers that take more abuse, I tend to buy the proprietary stuff. But not always. I wonder what experiences other admins and managers have had with do-it-yourself servers in a production environment, and whether they feel that white-box servers perform as well - - and last as long - - as anything else? What is the mix in your network of big-names to no-names?"
I bought a noname 2U server at $600 CDN for the company which gave us alotta grief... modems would never work in its PCI slots. So we decided to always go proprietary. All our big servers are ibm xseries.. and we buy ibm xseries 206 ($600 USD) for cheaper stuff. We never go Dell on servers.
I know you can build a superior system thats whitebox. MDG sells machines for cheap with Intel motherboards. You can buy Tyan mobos for whitebox systems.
However keep support in mind. Everytime something breaks on IBM xseries servers, we call tech support. In 4 hours of calling the replacement part arrives, and the techie arrives the same or next day and replaces the part no questions asked. Sure we've had lots of trouble on our tape drives etc, but it gets replaced painlessly, no driver changes, and no financial hits.
Another benefit of name brands is that you can say youve worked on so and so servers in your resume. Smart employers wouldnt or shouldnt count that, but you do see people asking for MCSE and proliant servers, etc. Its even more specific when you get into UNIX... they'll only accept that brand of unix.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The main difference you get with HP, IBM, Sun vs the rest is the manageability of the hardware.
A generic box fails, or has intermittant failure, and sometimes you are scratching your head figuring out what is wrong. The better designed gear will tell you that "Dimm 2 has been throwing ECC errors for the past couple of days". Gives you a place to look. In the generic box, you are replacing all the RAM sticks.
I don't see a whole lot of difference between a Dell and a whitebox.
I have had good experiences with HP, IBM, and Sun support. All have sent out technicians to fix problems promptly. Dell support is alright, but you need to twist their arm some time.
For rackmount gear go with a name brand. I have had nothing but trouble with generic white box rackmount gear. Recently a stack of 20 antec cases was 1/4" too high to fit in the industry standard rack.
For non rackmount servers I will go with HP/IBM/Sun if I want SCSI or similar server features. For really low end stuff I might go with white box but only if the hardware budget is an issue, or if I need a specialty box with specific hardware. If I go with a white box I always use higher end components so their isn't much of a price difference anyway.
The biggest issue I have had with white box machines is that the hardware was not designed to run 24/7 and it fails. Despite what the tweakers think most white box server cases have poor heat management. Adding more fans is not the solution when the harddrives sit in a dead zone of low air movement.
And again the support from HP, IBM, and Sun is really nice.
As a shop tech who assembles roughly a thousand PC's every month, I have to step in and say you have cobbled together the flakiest components ever seen. Allow me to explain:
Abit is in deep doggy-doo because they're under fire for extremely shoddy quality control and RMA service. I don't carry Abit anymore because 3 out of 4 boards would come back to us, and then Abit would sit on them for a few months before repairing or replacing them because they have no idea how to run a business (money and workforce issues).
ATI Graphics consistently have the worst drivers. I wish I could root for my own province, but they're really clueless when it comes to software. Even worse is their Radeon Xpress motherboard chipset, they're trying to play catchup with NVidia and they suck at it. NVidia made their chipset mistakes many years ago, now the NForce is at its 4th major generation and running strong. ATI's chipset is young and sluggish/unstable with frequent compatibility issues, and the whole Crossfire thing is a joke. They are pushing the wrong way, not only are they no longer capable of innovating, they're also incapable of mimicking their competitor's innovations. I'm very worried about their future.
Toshiba DVD-RW.. meh. They make fancy looking notebooks, and they make fancy looking DVD-RW drives. In terms of actual performance they're very average. If you want a great all around burner, get a Pioneer. If you want the absolute best, go Plextor (and pay the premium for elite quality gear). Anything else is a waste of time and money. Sony is garbage, LG is still not quite there yet, BenQ is laughable.. NEC is not bad if you get it cheaply, but these days the differences are in the single digits, big deal. Your time and grief spent troubleshooting a flimsy unit is worth far more.
Now that I've bashed everything, here are my personal recommendations.. I'm not particularly tied to any brand name, I'm just drawing from experience. Motherboards should be Asus or MSI, graphics go Matrox or NVidia low-end. Optical drive should be Pioneer or Plextor and nothing else.
Finally hard drives. I like Maxtor myself, they're not for everyone, they require a little extra care (cooling mostly). Seagate is nice with their 5 year warranty but they're the slowest drives I've ever seen in that class. WD is just in the middle, not too fast, not too slow, I like them for desktops.
DIY servers can be a great thing if you know what you're doing. Being qualified to use a screwdriver does not mean you know how to build a good PC, just as owning a multimeter does not make you an electrician, and compiling the VB.NET samples does not make you a programmer. Learn the ins and outs of the business, which may involve lots of research and meta-research, browsing forums to find out the general opinion about a given product; OR you could be smart and hire someone else who does this professionally. Myself, I don't see why everyone "needs" a server-class machine with 12 gigs of ram and I don't know how much disk. It runs commodity PC sotware that is designed for 32 bit processors at this time. The hardware is very similar to conventional retail parts, it's the support that juggles those options.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
We buy hundreds of white 1U pizzaboxen from SiliconMechanics.com every month (not only are they white, but they are also blank -- we net boot debian GNU/linux onto them ourselves). SM has an excellent record for replacing broken parts, although we're never in an emergency when something breaks since we deploy backup hardware for everything. If something breaks we can switch to the current backup, start converting a spare machine to be the new backup, and then take our time getting the broken hardware fixed, its all under warranty.
All of our vanilla services: mail, web, and even database are on white boxen from SM. We have some black box stuff for heavy mass storage.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
Here getting Dell to come out a fix one of their servers (even with 'silver' 4 hour cover) is like getting blood from a stone. With the IBM auto-support I had one occasion where a disk failed and we had the replacement before anyone noticed the problem (incorrectly configured RAID monitoring was the culprit re the lack of notification).
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
always buy 2 =)
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter