I worked up a server on Dell.com last night. It was a low-end server, just meant for file storage and backup. Nothing special. It worked out to just over $2600. I emailed it off to my rep at Dell. I got the quote back this morning at $3000. So I tweaked it a little bit, took some things off, changed the tape drive. Worked out to about $2500 or so. I emailed it again explaning that the last quote was more expensive than online, and that I was trying to keep the price lower than $3000. I got the quote back again… at $3000. Here:
I’ve upgraded the server to a PowerEdge 830.
The SC servers stand for Simple Computing and are just not as good as the 8th or 9th Generation servers.
I’ve also put in a RAID 5 with 3 drives so you have redundancy and speed.
Let me know if you need a UPS.
I think this is a much better option. Let me know what you think!
Obviously, I am not going to honor that with a reply. I know what is better and what isn’t. My customer however does not. They only know one thing: $. I think I will be going with IBM for my future commodity servers, as they offered me a server for $2200.
Update: Bobby has shown me some nice Sun servers. However, they are only available in rack version…. but they sure are pretty!
I actively dislike RAID 5 arrays in transactional environments, since unless you have a really good controller, every write to the array requires reading from every one of the disks.
The Sun boxes kick major league ass, and they’ve got a new one, an 8u (the Sun Fire v4500), that supports 4 dual core Opteron’s, and 24 TB of disk in the chassis. Yummy