Cheap Servers

[ddrueding]

My regular sales guy is offering some pretty good deals at the moment:

[h=2]Basic[/h]

HP Proliant DL360 Gen7​

• 
  [*=center]2x Intel Xeon E5620 CPUs - 2.4GHz, 4-Core, 12MB Cache
  [*=center]32GB DDR3 Memory
  [*=center]NO Hard Drives
  [*=center]1x P410i RAID Controller 512MB Cache
  [*=center]1x PSU 460w
  [*=center]1x Rail Kit

MSRP $3,350
IT Creations Price
$395
​

 

[Mercutio]

I literally just paid $10k for four 64GB E5630s and associated hard disks and crap. You're just doing this to taunt me.

 

[ddrueding]

5630s weren't on the list. But 5650s were.

HP Proliant DL360 Gen7​

• 
  [*=left]2x Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs - 2.66GHz, 6-Core, 12MB Cache
  [*=left]64GB DDR3 Memory
  [*=left]NO Hard Drives
  [*=left]1x P410i RAID Controller 512MB Cache
  [*=left]1x PSU 460w
  [*=left]1x Rail Kit

MSRP $5,150
IT Creations Price
$695

 

[mubs]

Cheap? They're giving them away! Are these obsolete or something? Wish I could take advantage of this incredible offer.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm sure they are off-lease.

 

[Chewy509]

Cheap? They're giving them away! Are these obsolete or something?

Previous generation kit. Absolutely nothing wrong with it, just obsoleted by a newer revision... So distributors generally clear the old stuff out at or just below cost to get rid of it.

Many years ago, I picked up a HP wx4600 workstation (Q9400, 4GB RAM, 146GB 15K SCSI drive, nVidia Quadro) for about half the price of buying the parts individually and building myself, as HP had just release the Z400/Z600/Z800 workstations and obsoleted the older models. The Australian distributor had over 30 in stock to clear...

 

[CougTek]

Cheap? They're giving them away! Are these obsolete or something?

There's quite a leap in performance between the old Xeon E56xx or X56xx and the Xeon E5-26xx. That's partly why there's also a rift in used selling price between those two generations as well, although with the recent price fall of the Xeon E5-2670 (Gen 1) on eBay, that gap has narrowed (but is still quite large).

Contrarily to the IBM X3x50 M3 of the same era, the HP G7 are at least supported by VMWare for ESXi 6.0. For the IBM, it stops at ESXi 5.5 Update 1 IIRC.

We have several HP and IBM servers at the office which use either the Xeon 55xx or Xeon 56xx. The VM, particularly the smaller VM with only one or two vcores, are starting to feel sluggish. The VM running on our main servers with Xeon E5-2600 v2 and v3 are very snappy compared to the stuff running from the older generations.

The Xeon E56xx or X56xx-based servers are still very usable and quite a bargain at the moment, but you have to keep your performance expectations in check. The one with the two Xeon X5650 and 64GB of RAM is by far the better deal IMO.