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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?"
there are two sides the issue here
big name - warranty (saving your ass)
white box - if you build it yourself you know what's in there. It's cheaper. But you don't have a warranty.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
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
Lights out management usually works better on IBM, HP or Dell systems. Also, building and fixing machines is a pain and gets time consuming & expensive, particularly if you get a bad batch of drives or motherboards that requires alot of fixing.
If you are running < 10-15 machines, I can see cost savings in going whitebox. But if you are tight on staff and runnings lots of machines, buying name-brand kit is cheaper in the long run.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The contents of the box are pretty generic for most purposes. Motherboard from Asus/Intel/..., BIOS from Phoenix/Award/..., Processor from Intel/AMD/Motorola/...
What really makes a difference is the vendor. I have a local guy who I can call and ask for recommendations and advice. If I tell him I want a Dual Opteron with 12 gig RAM, mirrored 74 GB hot-swap drives, dual hot-swap PS and a rack-mount case of my choosing he personally delivers it a couple days later.
Drive in my raid-array dies? He brings by a replacement the following day.
Oh, and the only number he gives me is his cell phone. And he answers it. Always.
With the exception of some specialized telephony equipment (actually a different white-box vendor specializing in that market - Dell et. al. wouldn't have a clue about this stuff), he is always my first call.
I've been using him for years. When the company he worked for ceased operations he started his own and service has remained outstanding.
I guarantee that nobody who uses the "name brand" machines can come anywhere close to the responsiveness and support that I get from my local vendor.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
We went the white-box route on our first compute cluster, which were then converted to desktops later. Decent machines, but the power-supplies weren't up to the 24x7 operation and tended to eventually have the fans sieze up, causing the ps to overheat. Eventually other components showed that they could have been better, and we cannibalized some machines to keep others running. They were replaced by HP and IBM boxes under 3-year, next-day, service contracts.
The advantage of calling IBM, HP, or even Dell, is not simply the service contract (though your time is worth something), or the fact that their QC is superior to wherever you're getting your parts from, but that they have real engineers, who worry about such issues as optimizing air-flow, choosing proper fan-sizes, etc. Take apart an IBM xSeries 345 some time, then try to decide if you could actually buy parts to build a machine like that, for less than just calling IBM.
White-box systems may have once made sense, ( I remember a 386/40 AMD-based system that I wrote my thesis on that was still running when I came to visit years later), but with modern components, heat-loads, etc, it pays to invest in properly engineered hardware, backed up by a company willing to service it on short notice. WB hardware may still make sense for desktops, if your environment keeps the data in non-local storage, so that a new desktop can be dropped, booted, and put into production immediately. Never with servers.
We adopted an informal, simple, but effective policy: Do not buy any machine that doesn't come with a three-year warranty, or hard-drive that doesn't come with a five year warranty.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
With the low price of low end servers you aren't going to save a lot of money going with the low end box.
Consider this, you buy, or build a white box. You'll end up with very short warranties provided by different companies, very much a pain in the arse. You may save $200. Now think of how much a 50k/year sysadmin makes per hour (roughly $25 if I did calc right)
So, $200/25 = 8 hours...
Now you've got $200 which is equivelent to 8 hours. Are you going to spend more times on a whitebox than a dell? I would say so. ESPECIALLY if you're building yourself. Consider extra time spent finding parts. Extra time putting it together. Then when things fail you have to round up the warranties for individual parts. Probably your warranties won't be as good as what dell provides. And then repair time. I know as a sysadmin we tend to repair ourselves anyway, but consider it may be something you WOULD let an on-site tech repair because you're busy...
In a home situation, I'd say build your own. When you're off the clock, your time is free. but at work, when time IS money, buy the named stuff.
BTW, my numbers are BS. Play with your own, I think you'll draw the same conclusions.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
After I lost my second finger in the sharp guts of a whitebox system while trying to fix it (again), I decided to go with brand-name and I never looked back.
I work in a fairly large datacenter, where I help support many of our colocated customer's equipment. Some of which we sell and maintain, some of which they purchase and colocate. I've seen a good mix of generic servers that were custom built because there was no pre-built options available. But when it comes to support - there are few options when things go down.
Motherboard company blames ram, ram company blames raid card manufacturer, raid card says it's a bad firmware version of the motherboard... two hours later, server is still down. Who's going to let us swap out a motherboard just to see if it works?
I don't see a price advantage to whitebox servers compared to modern server hardware from the big names. Anyone who's just looking at the price tag is fooling themselves.
Dell's hardware is unimpressive, I'll give a nod to the previous responder who mentioned that. And storage subsystems are still insane. Even with the evolution of SATA for slower mass storage, cost/MB is still too high with these subsystems.
Beware of a name brand's inexpensive servers. Some of the rock bottom units are cheap, but they lack some of the basics like raid, hot swap drives, expandability... On the bright side, even if you go with these cheap units, you'll still have service and support from a major player.
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.
For the Big, Important Servers-- customer-facing web servers, product db backend, major fileservers, etc-- then IBM, HP, NetApp for fileservers, etc seem to be the way to go. Use somebody who's built a name for themselves in the enterprise by service, not marketing; Dell still doesn't know how to support those needs.
But for intermediate servers-- internal web servers, testing boxes, etc-- you can go with a smaller company. It's still worth going with a company, rather than DIY: the company deals with fixing servers every day, has the parts on hand, etc. Your organization may have great people, but the guy who is constantly building servers for a living is going to beat you on service.
The smaller companies, like OffMyServer (blatant plug for a company who's done well by my employer), can meet your needs without breaking the bank. We have dozens of servers in my department alone, and we just couldn't afford to put a big HP contract on each of them.
ObDisclaimer: Speaking for myself, not my employer, my own opinions. Not affiliated with any of the above companies that I know of, other than that my company buys from all of them.
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.
One of the questions that you should answer for yourself is, "If this server is down, how much time will it take the boss to get pissed?" If the answer is less than one day then get a name brand and a service contract that guarantees a fix, but from the sounds of things, the answer might be more along the lines of multiple days. So as long as you can make it work then white box might be a better idea in the long run, if you can handle 3 days minimum for a part replacement.
Just my thoughts on the issue.
I have a server room filled with HP servers. We lease them for 3 years and then send them back. I have ZERO problems with the software and I get parts (usually drives) replaced in less than 24 hours.
These servers run 24/7 for the 3 years we have them and give us no problems at all.
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
I buy second hand named brand servers.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You take the four year old Dell Optiplexes within your organization that otherwise just go to a salvage aucton. You install Linux or a BSD OS on them.
'Big Name' at lower-than-white-box prices. Voila!
resigned
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
Besides, by depending on this guy, you've created a one-man point of failure. What happens when this guy gets sick or goes on vacation? Where's your immediate response then?
Even if he never gets sick or takes time off, he's not going to be able to sustain this level of service. His own good reputation will work against him. He's obviously one of those people who has to do everything himself. He's probably not very good at delegating or training, so he's never going to be able to scale up his operation. So unless he starts turning away business and dropping customers when they get too big for him to handle, he's going to get in out of his depth.
If I were in your shoes, I'd want my hardware needs met by a solid organization, once I could count on not just now, but years from now. And that has to do with people, not with where the boxes are assembled.
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.
I have to query this, I'm sorry:
Are you telling us you assemble ("roughly") 1 PC every 10m 37s? Does that include unpacking? All screws? Cable ties? Boot tests?
Decent machines, but the power-supplies weren't up to the 24x7 operation and tended to eventually have the fans sieze up, causing the ps to overheat.
Oh yeah, big time Achilles Heel of the generic PC, assuming name brand mobo and stuff.
It's just impossible to get a good power supply in a generic PC. ("Good" means built with decent quality components, like the Astecs and Lambdas you'll find in proprietary systems. It does not mean "Comes with a ThermalTake Fan and is the choice of 14-year-olds and overclockers!".)
My best success was based on a simple formula: the power-to-weight ratio. Buy the heaviest supply marked with a given advertised wattage rating.
Then, for server use, step 2 is to open up the supply and replace all the made-in-Bangladesh-or-Taiwan-or-China electrolytic capacitors with Spragues or Nichicons rated AT LEAST 1.5x the voltage ratings of the capacitors which were in there. And then out comes the no-name 12V fan, only to be replaced with a (loud! expensive! moves a hell of a lot of air! lasts forever!) Comair Rotron 120V fan running directly off the power line. Also gives you a chance to fix the *many* cold solder joints you're likely to find in commodity power supplies. All told, usually under an hour per supply, with the new fan often costing more than the supply!
Since I started doing this, I haven't had a single failure of one of my white-box server supplies.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
always buy 2 =)
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter