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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 $1,000 for a pretty mediocre computer. I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less. We'd spec out a standard configuration that we'd use for 18 months. CPU speeds and RAM sizes may change during that time, but socket types, memory standards, hard drive interfaces standards, etc, etc would be required to stay the same. We have Dell warranties right now, but I could see just keeping spare parts on the shelf and building that into the cost of the PC. We'd also be able to transfer Windows licenses because the Dell installs are non-transferable. However, I couldn't find anyone on the large scale doing this. Is anyone on Slashdot using PCs they built themselves on the large scale?"
What is on them, a Core i7 with 12GB of RAM and an SSD?
Me thinks you're overpaying... Dell isn't that expensive, really it isn't...
I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less.
This is an awful idea. I had some experience with such an experiment; it didn't work. The computers were failing left and right, and the vendor distanced itself from the situaton. You will first be forced to maintain all that herd, and eventually you will become a scapegoat.
Business is all about using money to make other money. It is a legitimate expense to buy a computer; it's tax-deductible on corporate level, so you don't need to squint too hard at the prices. Buy good computers with a warranty and on-site support and be happy.
Use server based VMs or terminal servers. Then use winterms for the desktops. You can get those for a couple a hundred dollars and they last forever.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
It sounds like you could compete with Dell and that you should start a company. Maybe then you realise that 1kUS$ isn't that much for a system.
Don't make the mistake of not calculating the effort it costs you to assemble the systems yourself. Say you cost a modest 100US$ per hour to your employer and redo the maths.
You seem to know about hardware. Now consider how you will train co-workers to attain your level of expertise. Will you now be teaching as well? Think of what will happen when you'll leave the company. Don't worry, you eventually will move on to other challenges.
I myself build the systems for my own small business. It's costs me significant amounts of effort which I could put towards paying customers. I only do it because I like it and because I take the liberty to do so. But really, I probably shouldn't.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
You're crazy if you think it's worthwhile building the PCs yourself. You can easily find an off-the-shelf PC for considerably less than $1000, probably less than $500, and unless you have a team of at least 6 people sitting around with nothing better to do then you won't save money building them yourself, and you'll just cause yourself a massive headache. Simply commissioning 100 pre-built PCs (presuming you're planning to replace 10% of them at a time) is plenty of work for a support dept., even if you're not making massive software changes.
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.).
FoxConn make most of the world's computers. Seriously. Approach them for what you need and say you need x1000. They'll build what you want without the 3rd party markup.
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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.
I'd advise against it. We tried it where I worked. It sounds good to build your own boxes on the cheap, but it rarely works out like that. You build your own computers. The cards (ethernet, video, etc.) you used a few months might not be on sale this month, so you now have multiple versions of cards. If buying them in bulk, the line probably gets refreshed so it's hard to buy the same model of hardware twice. Then, when you have to rebuild an older computer a year or two later, you have to remember where you put those drivers for that particular card that this computer uses. Since it was bought on the cheap, it probably isn't marked very well and unless you had the luxury of looking at the computer before it went down, what model it is might not even be known. Even then, since the hardware was bought cheap, the drivers might not be as easy to get online as one would think, especially if the company isn't around anymore. There is also all sorts of tiny details dealing with this or that hardware that has to be remembered. Then you need storage for all the bits, parts, and driver software. Trying to call in hardware warrantees for the products you buy will usually be much more time consuming than just calling your vendor and having them do everything based on the serial number of the broken computer. In the end, building and maintaining our own computers was way more trouble and man hours than just going with a name brand such as HP or Dell and using their warrantees. Whatever got saved in material costs in building our own computers got more than spent in extra man hours maintaining them.
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.
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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.
Our product is, technically, little more than a computer in a fancy box. We started off wanting to buy a small computer and shove it in, but found that we needed way more power than anything available at the correct form-factor.
Being computer guys, we figured we'd just build it ourselves.
Truth is, around here (Toronto), OEM computer suppliers are everywhere. Good ones (Infonec) with reasonable inventory and reasonable access, Poor ones (Tiger direct) with huge inventory and no access, and remote ones with infinite access and no inventory. So we're covered from every angle be it some rare component or an immediate same-day requirement.
Do components break? Sure. Some hardware is defective out of the box. That goes onto the reject shelf. Some break when we drop it. That goes into the garbage. Some break after they are installed when it's just not stable and it takes many hours to figure which part is at fault. Those are annoying, but they go onto the reject shelf just the same.
The reject shelf gets turned over by mail with a few RMA phone calls every few months. The nice part is that if you wait long enough, you tend to get newer models from the manufacturer, so it's winds up almost being worth-while.
The garbage is, honestly, an easy thing to avoid. Wear cotton, ground yourself, and never put a motherboard onto a chair unless you atcually want someone to sit on it.
The nice thing about 1'000 is that while you can't get much of a discount on the components themselves, you do get more than priority service from the suppliers. And that can really be valuable when it means that your deployment schedule is uninterupted.
Yes you can save money. You should wind up saving about 40% over a dell machine. Of course, you'll lose the warranty service. And that's where the trick comes in. You get to balance something that you've never balanced before.
You get to say: "cheaper = more servicing = more expensive" while also saying "higher quality = less servicing = still expensive"
Here's the trick: "higher quality = longer life-span = re-use"
The real savings aren't on those 40%, because you have to service them instead of dell servicing them. dell's more efficient (money wise) than you are. But because of that, dell's cost-optimizing the quality, because they don't get to keep it. They'd rather take the risk that the parts won't break, and fix the 20% that do.
That doesn't work for you.
You want to spend more, only saving 20%, then you want to do minor upgrades at the right now, so really only wind up saving 10%, then you want the machines to last twice as long, and be able to salvage the parts for future machines -- repeatedly. This also has service replacements of broken parts and diagnostic repair fed for free.
In the end, you wind up spending the same 100% out of the gate, you spend only 80% the second generation, and then you spend closer to 40% by the third generation.
In the end, you have high-quality machines, top-quality parts, and very few break. Service calls are not only at a minimum, but you're just swapping out the possibly bad parts with known-good parts, then checking the possible bad parts at a later, more convenient date.
You're also providing the new guy with a better computer to get him started on the right foot, you're giving the guy with a lot of work to do this week that extra gig of ram to make it easier.
But yes, this presumes that you are comfortable running such a service. It's definitely easy to do, but it's complicated as hell to keep it organized.
Little more complicated than you make it out to be. To be truly redundant that a switch going down won't take out a bunch of systems you have to have the systems themselves plugged in to two switches, and then every switch down the line. That can work but not only takes a lot more switches, but more complex clients. Most thin clients aren't going to do that. You need not only 2 NICs but the understanding of how to handle failover. Also if the failover is to be fast and reliable you need expensive switches. Maybe not a problem, maybe you use those anyhow, but something that has to be considered. At every level the switches need to be high end such as Cisco to be able to quickly, reliably, handle rebuilding the span. No Linksys stuff that may freak out and create a switching loop (which they do with RSTP sometimes, as I've seen).
Bandwidth needs will also go up substantially. If you go a little heavy on the oversubscription in a normal office setup, no big deal all it means is file transfers to the servers are slow. Do it in a thin client environment, and you are talking interface lag which is really bothersome. So you'll need to have plenty of bandwidth to the switches, probably 10gb instead of gig, and maybe more to the distribution switches.
Then you also have to do redundant power for the switches. If both switches on a floor are on the same breaker it doesn't help much, you need separate circuits, all the way out to the grid/generator if you want real independence.
Of course there's the servers also. If one server runs 50 machines, well then its failure is a major outage. So you'll need backup servers. How many depends on how much depth you think you need, but you need to have servers ready to take over if one goes down. Probably fairly beefy servers too. While you can stack low-impact servers (like DNS or license servers) pretty heavy on a VM, you have to be more careful with interactive systems. Get too many, they'll get sluggish. You'll want lots of CPU, lots of RAM, and still won't want to load clients on them too heavy. You'd have to test your specific setup to find what works but I'd bet no more than 2 clients per server core and probably less.
That also means everything has to be on a separate, high speed, disk system. You can't use local storage or they can't be migrated to new servers. So something like a NetApp. Disks need to be high performance too, since they are going to have a lot of random access put on them. IO is also the biggest problem for multiple VMs. No large cheap SATA arrays, you'll need 15k SAS most likely and SSDs would be a good idea, except real expensive.
Well that needs to be backed up too. If everything is riding on one NetApp, reliable though it is, that's a massive failure point. So you need two of them, running in sync, so that if there's a failure there's no problem.
Ok this is all doable, no question about it. I could design an implement such a system... However I'd have real questions as to if it would save any money. You weigh all that high end gear with service contracts against the cost of a bunch of reasonable desktops. Is it really worth it? My guess is not.
Also remember you aren't saving any money on other server costs. You still need all your other server infrastructure. Maybe you could get rid of your central storage and just use the storage the VMs are on, but I would have to see that in action to be convinced the performance would be ok.
The thin client idea isn't a money saver I don't think, unless low performance/reliability is ok. Maybe a school lab situation or the like. I think it is more the sort of thing you'd do when you need portability (like no matter where someone physically is in the building, they can get to "their" computer) or for security (for whatever reason you want all systems physically in a secure room).