Thinking of moving our website from pay-as-you-go hosting to building our own servers.
I’ve looked around at the Dell site for 2U servers and I wasn’t terribly impressed with the pricing. Here’s what I want:
dual quadcore (8 CPUs total)
8 gb+ memory
reliable hotswappable RAID 5 or RAID 10 (preferably raid 10)
I configured the Dell 2U to what I wanted at around $1,900, sans memory or hard drives (but with a nice dual redundant PSU). The Dell pricing for these items is extortionate. In contrast (and quite surprisingly) their CPU prices are reasonable. I don’t need massive CPU power for this box, though, just 8 modern cores; I’d rather spend my $$ on tons of memory and highly redundant storage.
So I’d add 16 GB of memory which is around $400 (DDR2-667), and six commodity 500 GB SATA hard drives which are around $480 ($80 each) to build the RAID 10 array.
That puts the dell total at $2,700. Can anyone do better?
(oh, and the reason we’re looking at this is because ~$600 per month in hosting fees adds up pretty rapidly, plus our host wants friggin’ extortionate rates to upgrade our server memory – like almost double the monthly cost. )
With the two “cheap” Xeon quadcores, 16 GB ECC, and six 500 GB commodity hard drives that all comes to $2,302.
That also means we’d be using the built-in Intel “ESB2” RAID functionality vs. the Dell add-in pci express RAID card. Nor do we get the nice dual redundant PSU. Seems like a wash to me.
Current memory prices are great. $116 for 4 GB (2 x 2) of 667. The Lenovo server has 12 slots. I assume they can be populated in pairs so $116 x 4 or under $500 for 16 GB memory.
Hard drives are cheap, too. I could get six 500 GB drives (for RAID 10) at $70 each, so $450 for 500 GB RAID 10.
Seems like the cheap one w/ upgrades is the way to go; no way is that slow Xeon quad in the same box worth an additional $257.
So we have:
$500 + $450 + $700 + $1,491 = $3,141.
The only thing I worry about, is that this basic model sounds like it uses the default onboard Intel RAID stuff. The docs say it supports RAID 0,1,5,10,50 – is the onboard Intel RAID good enough?
The only criteria for server RAID for me has been hot-swappable drive capability and a RAID controller that can rebuild on the fly if a disk is swapped out. I don’t know about those Intel controllers, but that’s what I’d look into.
Looks like it’s gonna be a server-building Xmas for me! Isn’t that the best kind?
I pulled the trigger on the barebones RS120 (2U) and the RD110 (1U). $2,100 for both + $60 shipping.
They include CPUs and basic amounts of memory. I bought 6 hard drives (500GB) to play with building RAID arrays up (RAID 10 for the 2U, simple RAID 1 mirroring for the 1U) and make sure I understand it all.
I also picked up 2 x 2GB 667Mhz DDR2 FB-DIMMs to make sure the memory upgrade will “take”.
Once I have it all set up, I’ll buy the “real” CPUs and the rest of the drives and memory to fully populate them. I guess I should buy some extra HDDs to ship to the hosting datacenter in the case of array failure, too…
I suppose a backup 1U is probably a good idea as well, since that one was pretty cheap.
I learned a ton about the server market, so if you have questions, ask away. Amazing what you can learn when you let your pocketbook pay for it. I CAN HAS KNOWLEDGE!
I think it makes sense if you’re already a Windows shop and don’t have the budget or time to learn how to configure and administrate less familiar operating systems and applications.
