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Generic PCs For Corporate Use?
porkThreeWays writes "I work for a government agency supporting about 1000 PCs. The economy has hit us just like everyone else and we are looking at ways to save money. We currently buy Dell computers and even with our government discounts end up spending about $1,000 for a pretty mediocre computer. I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less. We'd spec out a standard configuration that we'd use for 18 months. CPU speeds and RAM sizes may change during that time, but socket types, memory standards, hard drive interfaces standards, etc, etc would be required to stay the same. We have Dell warranties right now, but I could see just keeping spare parts on the shelf and building that into the cost of the PC. We'd also be able to transfer Windows licenses because the Dell installs are non-transferable. However, I couldn't find anyone on the large scale doing this. Is anyone on Slashdot using PCs they built themselves on the large scale?"
One thing you are not taking into account is labor. By buying a Dell (I don't like Dell, but this applies to any manufacturer), the time and expense in building is included in the cost. When you look at parts, it looks less, but add your time in building, time to diagnose an issue when the machine doesn't boot, and time to RMA parts and repair said machine when it breaks. This adds up quick. I work for a company that built its own machines for sale and we found a company that could build and warranty them for $10 more. That $10 extra was very well spent. So remember, you are getting more than just parts, you are getting the time to assemble, repair and replace.
Most large companies are required to negotiate a Volume Licensing agreement with MS which results in a specific amount of licensing costs based on the FTE (Full-Time Employment/Equivalent positions) of the company, which are adjusted periodically, usually quarterly or annually. These type of licensing deals typically allow any number of workstation licenses to be used, and often end up with a similar cost to a typical OEM license.
Software Assurance contract with Microsoft might actually be cheaper than paying for all those OEM Windows and Office licenses in the long run.
I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less.
This is an awful idea. I had some experience with such an experiment; it didn't work. The computers were failing left and right, and the vendor distanced itself from the situaton. You will first be forced to maintain all that herd, and eventually you will become a scapegoat.
Business is all about using money to make other money. It is a legitimate expense to buy a computer; it's tax-deductible on corporate level, so you don't need to squint too hard at the prices. Buy good computers with a warranty and on-site support and be happy.
^^this, I to have tried it, it just doesn't work, despite what people think dell are working on low margins but making it up with high volume. There are so many hidden costs to building and maintaining your own fleet. I worked at place that had the same idea and by coincidence it was dells we were thinking were over priced, we built and supported our own only to find out after 3 years that the average price ended up being almost 20% higher than dell even though initial costs were cheaper.
I know a local fortune 500 company that tried this at one of their two buildings here at their corporate campus a couple years ago. Well, they are back to a desktop at every cubical now because they found if something happened, like a switch went down, suddenly all 100 - 200 terminals on that floor was down and no one could do anything until it was back up. With desktops, they may not be able answer emails, but they could at least still use office and get something accomplished if the network went down. You take 100 employs making 20/hr sitting and doing nothing for 2 - 3 hours and you've bought yourself the cost of the PC's.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I think the answer might just be to try renegotiating your price or specs. I also work for a government institution with about 1000 computers and we pay about $450 with Dell for what I would consider a very decent desktop computer (4GB of RAM, Intel Core 2, etc.).
Volume licenses for large corporates are about the same as OEM, so no problem there. As for hardware? stick with bog standard and Windows 7 (or any other Windows for that matter) won't say a peep. I did a 30 box rollout for an SMB that way, and last I heard they are happy as clams. I'd suggest AMD as Intel has been socket hopping too much lately, whereas AMD is backwards compatible. But you get a bog standard business class AMD motherboard (I've had good luck with ECS Business) and the ONLY thing that ever changes on those things is the GPU. The sound is all Realtek high def, the NICs are all Realtek too, the north and south bridge AMD. The worst you might have is windows asking to re-run WGA, which takes seconds on any real network, but I've frankly not seen it on the ones where I used bog standard business class. That is one of the nice thing about AMD Business class motherboards, I can carry the latest drivers for just about every board they current sell on a little thumbstick with space left over. There simply isn't much variation.
As for TFA? Go 5-10% over for spares and you'll be fine. If it is 1000 seats I'd want 50 spares just to cover Murphy's Law and to allow for expansion. Go with bog standard AMD dual core kits and you can pick up the hardware for less than $300 at someplace like Tigerdirect (hell last week they were selling AMD quads with 2Gb of RAM for $269) and your MSFT volume license will take care of the OS. Just make a disc image with the standard apps your place uses and you're good to go. I'm sure you have volume licenses for it so no worries, and by DIY you KNOW what is going into the PC. I've had bad luck with the lower model Dells really skimping on parts like caps. Better to get a board with good solid state caps that will really last. The ones I built cost $575 with 17 inch monitors and can be upgraded to a quad with 16Gb of RAM if someone has higher needs than the average office Joe. For a dual core with quality parts and 2Gb of RAM apiece it was really quite reasonable IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
- You need to have some very frank discussions with either your Dell rep, or whomever is speccing out your quotes. $1k for corporate-level desktop PC in this day and age is ridiculous; you should be expecting to pay more like $600-700. To give you an idea, I work for a state university, and we're currently giving about $550 for a Core2 E8400/4Gig Ram/160gig HD HP. Integrated video and no monitor of course, but a 3 year warranty. Sure you're not going to be decoding the human genome with that machine but it's more than enough for your average office worker. Don't be afraid to use HP as a club against your Dell rep; they're currently getting hammered by HP in the corporate world, and won't want to lose your account, assuming you're of any kind of size. I wouldn't recommend going to HP unless you absolutely have to though; service is horrible.
- Take some time to consider whether the time spent building custom machines is really worth the time of whomever would be doing it. Chances are, it is not. Either you're going to have someone making peanuts doing the work, or a skilled IT person who really isn't all that interested in doing what essentially is grunt work. In either case, you're going to see problems.
- If you haven't already, you should discuss this with your purchasing department before moving forward. Depending on the level of beauracracy that is entrenched in your level of government, building your own computers may not even be permissable.
You mentioned that you couldn't find anyone doing this on a large scale, this should be a warning flag. Lot of potential problems and pitfalls here, not the least of which is your cunning "transfer the OEM licenses" plan. There are a lot of better ways to save money on computer purchases.
This is the correct answer. Seriously, don't even consider 1,000 hand built computers.
Buying 1,000 desktops should give you a lot of leverage. First thing you should be doing is getting bids from HP and IBM as well as Dell. But I'd have thought three quotes would already be a bare minimum in your corporate requirements. Remember and add a service deal. At $1,000 per PC, I'd be expect a four year maintenance deal with next day or even same day on site service.
Your thought was to have a standard configuration that would last 18 months. Well desktops should be able to run for four years, plenty of businesses are doing that already, and those Dell computers now have a lifespan 2.66 times that of your computers with Dell supporting the hardware for the duration.
If you have onsite tech staff, you should also be able to bypass technical support and simply declare parts as failed and have replacements shipped out. If you don't have staff that can support that, you should at least get priority business support that gets you a knowledgeable tech and a guaranteed fast answer time.
There are two main concerns with moving into a self-created solution - standardization and support. Standardization Dell may load a lot of bloat-ware on their consumer level machines but for corporations or the Government the Dell X-Image process can be used to standardize the base level install. This process allows for an IT department to build a base OS standard environment applications on a single platform of hardware regardless of the equipment in use. After baselining the system the image is uploaded via a standard web interface on which you also select the hardware platforms being used in the environment - laptop, workstation, desktop, thin client, etc. Dell then takes your baseline and codes it back using their X-Image process encorporating in all necessary drivers for the models you have selected then sends it back to you. It's basically an outsourced slipstream of the OS made extremely easy by Dell. The nicest part if you are a corporation or Government entity? It's free. Contact your Dell sales rep and ask about the process. This allows for standardization not only for hardware via the same manufacturer but also for the OS and applicaitons in use on those platforms. Support Dell may be a P.I.T.A. for consumer level services but for corporate or Government they are right there with HP and other high-end channels. Next day replacement part shipment - or within 4 hours based on purchased support for servers - means sites do not need to keep on-hand stock of components except for maybe a few key resources for critical systems. There is also no need to train your support team on how to replace these parts as Dell will send a technician to your site with the part to perform the replacement, test the system following replacement, and take the bad part with them for return to Dell. Considering the cost of the support of the systems is built into the purchase price of the system the overhead support cost is lowered and the staff is allowed to focus on the more "fun" issues related to using Microsoft products in a large scale environment. IF you wish to have in-house parts and repair capabilities, Dell will supply on-site sparing of parts and offer training to your IT staff to perform the actual replacement of parts. The best part here? If your staff is trained and completes the warranty work in house, Dell sends you back a credit of x number of dollars per "call" - I put x as the last time I was involved in contract negotiation was 5 years ago and while it was $40 per incident at that time I would expect there has been some change in amoount. I work for the Government as well and Dell while in my opinion as an IT professional is annoying and bothersome to say the least, and while I know I could build a better, more powerful, and more robust hardware platform for the same cost, in an environment where standardization, quick support, compatibility, and operational state of my users are all at a premium desire of the customer, I say leave the headache of those messes to upper management and Dell. It may cost up to $250 more per system to have them supplied by Dell but considering standard rate of a technician and taking into account the amount of time needing to be spent on building and deploying, then training and support, combined in with overhead costs for maintaining parts and stock, the cost difference is a loss not a gain.
We Are Stardust...We Are Golden...
Try the Dell Outlet. Great discounts and the very same warranty as new systems.
You can't order more than 5 per order, so it sucks to shop, but the savings can approach 30-40% on current model systems.
We had a pretty awful failure rate with HP's t5135 and t5145 units: they'd fail reasonably regularly and/or lose their config. Not impressive machines by a longshot, not when you add the poor performance they'd exhibit (can't handle bitmap caching, slow response).
Replaced with Wyse C10LEs, which aren't high-power machines either, but they're reviewing much better and, thusfar, aren't erasing themselves periodically.
--srj/mmv
I agree with everyone saying "don't do it".
I used to work as an engineer for one of the top US computer makers. Most people have no idea how much testing the big computer makes put into integrating their systems.
Say we wanted to support shipping 3 different sizes memory sticks from 2 different vendors. We would test every possible permutation of size and vendor in loading the memory slots. The test systems were run in an environmental chamber where we ramped the temperature from the minimum to the maximum operating ranges. We also ramped the power supply from -10% to +10% of specification.
Say one of the disk drive vendors wanted us to qualify a new capacity disk drive. That too took a similar amount of testing; racks full of computers reading and writing to the disks while in the environmental chamber.
This testing *did* uncover problems frequently. We would discover that (for example) we couldn't use a certain Hitachi memory stick with a certain Samsung memory stick if the temperature rose past a certain point. We would find that a specific Western Digital drive had errors under certain conditions with a LSI controller but no problems with an Adaptec controller.
The point of all this is that there is just no way that a small shop is going to have the resources that a major computer maker does to test their integration. There is more to successful system integration then just grabbing a bunch of off-the-shelf components.
Have you considered off-lease machines? At the school where I'm admin we get Core 2 Duos with 2GB RAM and a 1 yr warranty for $280 each.
I agree with several posts here . "homemade" computers tend to be the best performing and over all best investment if you know what you are doing when you design the system. But all the overhead costs in such a large environment is pretty prohibitive. You have to remember that "end users " are using these machines. They will not treat it as nicely as you would. You may be thinking "I build a better computer than those darn cheap Dells and I never have problems with the ones I build." That is probably true, but you will probably have the same amount of problems in the end with you home built ones since the end users will abuse them. And why does a cubical worker even need a higher end machine anyway? All they do mostly is crunch numbers in Excel and shoot off emails. The cheapest computer out there with enough RAM should last you 18 month turn around. Only reason I would say build your own is if you have some high end users doing rendering or something that needs some extra power. Then you may have prob 10 -20 "special" machines to build and maintain. The others can just be the vanilla Dells. And one of the other posters was probably correct in that you probably got "sold" at $1000 per PC. $450-$550 sounds more like it.
I feel your pain, as I face a similar situation
I've been building PC's for over 20 years, and we all know how finicky building machines by hand can be. That said, the morass and mess of Government Regulations make it difficult to procure cheap, effective desktops for government workers. Anyone who thinks you can go out and buy a $400 Desktop and slap it on a government desk is completely ignorant of the facts and rules.
Quite simply: Any computer that the Government buys HAS to be 508 compliant. It's an E&IT device, and the purchaser HAS to prove that the device has met the given accessibility standards (or face the legal repercussion). And let me tell you, those $600 dollar machines from Dell and HP don't come with VPAT's (Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates). For those you WILL pay $850 or more, even considering the government bulk discounts.
Of course there are a few good WhiteBox vendors out there who are on the GSA schedule. However, try to find one with VPAT's, and you'll be looking a frigg'n long time. I've been looking for months, and have yet to find any. One I liked, AvaDirect, has great white box products, customizable and is on the GSA schedule. Unfortunately no VPAT's.
The simple economics of the issues are that you can buy decent components, from reputable vendors, and assemble generic white box machines for a heck of a lot less than you can get from HP/Dell whomever.
Components ARE exempted from 508 compliancy rules, and we all know you can build a decent i3 530 system, 4G of Ram, and a $320 gig drive for well under $500 a pop. Even assume a 20% failure rate, and $100 an hour for labor, and you are STILL hundreds of dollars ahead of the robbery the big vendors are charging. OS? I'm more than willing to bet your agency has already payed Microsoft for an OS licensing, so why pay for something you already have? Warranty? Not only do you have the ones on the components, but you buy spares. Even assuming 20% failure rate, you can easily stock up on spares (i.e. Corporate Stable Models), and save. Storage? Sure it's an issue, but so is spending the $$ to pay for shipping back and forth from a mega vendor. Drivers and stuff? Look, you'll have to tweak those machines to meet FDCC (or USGCB as the case may be) guidelines anyway, so adding a few more drivers to a WDS deployment image isn't any big deal.
Listen, I know (and honestly believe) that building machines for such an endeavor, is a terrible way to go. However as terrible as that option is, the alternatives are even worse. As a government employee I would not feel comfortable knowing I'd thrown hundreds of dollars away for each machine we purchased from one of the big mega vendors. Our custom whiteboxes would be better constructed, more efficient and overall a much better deal for the employees, the IT staff, not to mention the taxpayers.
It's your choice, but we're going the component way, and I hope the taxpayers appreciate the efforts.
I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less.
Dell in its prime was absorbing the entire annual output of its Asian OEMs. When there was a dock strike in L.A. it hired fleets of air cargo planes to maintain just-in-time production lines.
Parts are cheap when you purchase them in the millions.
If you assemble and maintain your PCs in-house, you will have to pay US wages and benefits. You will need to maintain parts in inventory. You will need to hire someone to keep your home-brewed systems in repair. All of this costs money.
Listen to the advice in this thread. You cannot do better building the PCs yourself unless you have a pretty massive support infrastructure, space, time, and staff.
It is a legitimate expense to buy a computer; it's tax-deductible on corporate level
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant. It is not true that buying a computer is tax deductible. A computer is normally a capital expense. It is purchased and then depreciated over the useful life of the asset to emulate "using up" the asset over time. While this does reduce profits to the corporation and thus normally reduces their tax bill, saying that a computer is tax deductible is not true for businesses of any size under normal circumstances.
Aside from that nit, I agree. Building your own machines on any significant scale is a most likely a very bad idea. High chance of serious problems and it's only cheaper if you don't factor in the time required by the staff to assemble the machines. Unless you work for HP, thinking that you can build 1000 computers cheaper than Dell is delusional. As an accountant, I'm quite sure it would be cheaper, even at $1000 a machine to buy the computers from Dell or another similar vendor than to have my staff build the machines in house.
This bit of the thread is the only reply that makes sense to me. I did this myself 12 years ago personally supporting 150 users, about half were homebrew by me and half were OEM of some sort (dell, gw2k back when they were a real company, apple - yes in that day..., other stuff). I had no problems with the stuff I built because I knew exactly what was in it. There is no telling what component Dell will change out from day to day even if meeting your standard spec. The only place I would pick an OEM and not deviate would be for laptop support. Fixed desktop and low-end server you are best building yourself.
Even though I have been out of IT, I have kept my eye on it. My biggest reservation I would have about recommending a similar strategy (abandon Dell) at my company is I think the IT staff is not competent to pull it off (and that is far afield from my current assignment). Yes, there is a hidden cost in assembly that you need to assign man hours to ($100 an hour from a post below is probably reasonable), but if you do it right the cost of change is zero (meaning extra "management" or whatever costs not in your breakeven between build and OEM) and the cost of maintenance should decrease considerably. Maybe you break even up front (considering that you might have to over order, but if you really do 1000 systems at once, you can go low on replacement parts initially I would think) and make money on reduced maintenance. That is, if you and your people are competent. If they are incompetent, you are going to be paying for it no matter what...
18 months seems really short to me too... I would think a reasonable spec machine should last three to four years at least.
Bzzt. Wrong answer. Centralized computing did not 'fail'. It fell out of favor because of perceived cost. Corporations and governments knew exactly how much IT was costing them. They knew how many employees were dedicated to IT. They knew how much the equipment cost. They knew how much the software cost. They knew how much electricity and cooling the datacenters used. It was a big number. They billed each department it's share of the total IT cost. Then managers discovered the PC, and said 'hey I can save a lot of money by using these instead of the centralized IT'.
Now, companies are waking up to the true costs of that 'cheap' PC-based environment. They see how much time is wasted patching all those PCs. They see the damage caused by viruses and worms when someone does something dumb on their un-patched PC. They see the effects of lost data when someones PC crashes and wasn't backed up because the backup grinds their PC to a halt for an hour or two a week. They see the damage done to their reputation when some department server is scrapped and happens to contain sensitive information.
"You can still buy these? I wouldn't be surprised if an 80GB drive costs more than a 320 or 500 at this point in time."
Yes you can still buy them, and a 80gb is about $10 cheaper than a 500gb
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Required by Microsoft.
Example:
While I was working at a medium sized university, we used to buy single licenses for each computer, and charge the cost of the license to the department the computer was destined for. One year, while we were in the process of buying a bulk lot of licenses to upgrade our systems (from NT4 to 2000, if I remember correctly), our MS rep told us that we would not be able to proceed with the purchase unless we went with a volume license agreement. (This became inconvenient for us, since we didn't have a specific key to attach to the charge back, and some departments didn't want to change, but that's another story.)
Volume Licensing _never_ includes the base Windows OS license. It only has upgrades. You need to buy your PC's with a OEM Windows licence, or purchase retail licenses and then possibly upgrade or downgrade them with the Volume Licensing rights.
The should have a redundant network, regardless of whether they use PCs or windows terminals. Switched networks are extremely reliable if you buy the right ones and put them into the right architecture. For example, as the windows terminals are more reliant on the network than PCs (somewhat debatable though because of all the web based apps these days), then a better architecture would have been to multiple 24 or 48 port switches uplinked to two separate aggregation switches, such as Cisco 6500s. If one of the 24 or 48 port switches dies, they're cheap to hold in spares, although if you buy good ones (e.g. Cisco, Juniper etc.) they'll be very reliable, and be able to swap it out in no more than an hour, and only have 24 or 48 windows terminals down at once for no more than an hour (more like no more than half an hour). If one of the upstream aggregation switches goes down the other one will take over all the traffic until you replace the failed one.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one head on one side of one low-density platter a lot more reliable than today's highest areal density disks and twice the mechanical pieces?
I always buy 'one generation behind', prices are low and bugs are worked out. I spec machines for our labs, and I always suggest the lowest speed CPU at the current fab process, the smallest hard drive, and maxed-out RAM that matches the FSB. For 'general purpose' office computers, CPU is basically a non-issue, neither are graphics. Hard drive -latency- and insufficient RAM are root of the bottlenecks users (used to) gripe about.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Because high power (ie high TDP) Intel Core i7's (hex-cores and some high-end quad-cores) use a LGA 1366 socket, whereas other intel Core chips use a LGA 1156 or a PGA-989 socket. Newegg lists 40 LGA 1366 motherboards, none of which have onboard graphics.