CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Well, hopefully, only a temporarily piss-poor company.
A person close to me asked me towalk on water help his company build a decent virtualization server for under 5 grands. Even worse, I'm talking about 5000$CDN, not U$ (so it's more like ~4400U$). The server also has to be a tower, not rackmount, because, surprisingly, as a young company, they don't have a rack. It's going to be their main server for the next few years, or until they manage to generate some real cash, which probably won't happen before another two years.
It will be a development server on which they'll run their virtual machines. It will probably be an Hyper-V server 2012 R2. Since the server will be used for several years and that they'll be able to upgrade it later on when they'll have additional income, I've tried to put most of the money on the components that would be the most expensive to replace or upgrade later on: the CPU and the server model itself. Things like drives and RAM are easy to add-in later on and since they shouldn't run that many virtual machines in the beginning, skimping on RAM and storage space/speed shouldn't limit them too much early on.
When you need enterprise grade components, but you don't have an enterprise-like budget, you can forget big brand names like HP, Cisco, Fujitsu and Dell. Like I'll show later on, even something like a (still unavailable) Lenovo ThinkServer TD350 would bust the targeted budget, unless you severely cripple the server. So there's Supermicro and the Tawanese manufacturers like Asus and GigaByte. There might also be something interesting from Tyan, but their stuff is hard to come by around here. Same goes for GigaBytes' and Asus' servers. Supermicro is therefore pretty much the only available option.
Here's what I can get for under 5K$, combined to making a sales manager bleed and making him beg for mercy :
And that is it. There's not enough RAM, the boot drive isn't in RAID1 and the storage pool just plain sucks, but it's all I can fit inside 5 Grands. At least, they have an 8-bay SFF drive cage linked to a very potent RAID adapter, so they'll be able to add faster storage later on, should they need it. There's still space for 6 more nearline storage drives (albeit SATA ones) if they need additional low-io storage. BTW, I know that the v4 of the Seagate constellation is out, but the 2TB model is ~50$ more expensive per drive and that would have blown the budget.
The CPU is too much for the beginning, but you have to go for at least the E5-2650 v3 if you want the RAM to operate at 2133MHz, otherwise, you're stuck at 1866MHz. That's why I didn't go for 2x E5-2630 v3 instead.
I could also have saved ~350$ by opting for the Supermicro 7048R-TR, but then they would have been stuck with just 8x LFF SATA drives for their storage. So the server would have permanently sucked reagarding the storage iops. By investing into the 7048R-C1R4+, the storage sluginess is at least curable later on. They get 4 gigabit Ethernet ports as a bonus too, which might be useful eventually.
The closest big brand model in term of price and features is the Lenovo TD350. Similarly configured, mainly because the RAM is slightly more expensive and the storage too, it inflates to ~5700$CDN. It looks like a very nice server, but it simply doesn't fit in.
Agreeing with my choices?
A person close to me asked me to
It will be a development server on which they'll run their virtual machines. It will probably be an Hyper-V server 2012 R2. Since the server will be used for several years and that they'll be able to upgrade it later on when they'll have additional income, I've tried to put most of the money on the components that would be the most expensive to replace or upgrade later on: the CPU and the server model itself. Things like drives and RAM are easy to add-in later on and since they shouldn't run that many virtual machines in the beginning, skimping on RAM and storage space/speed shouldn't limit them too much early on.
When you need enterprise grade components, but you don't have an enterprise-like budget, you can forget big brand names like HP, Cisco, Fujitsu and Dell. Like I'll show later on, even something like a (still unavailable) Lenovo ThinkServer TD350 would bust the targeted budget, unless you severely cripple the server. So there's Supermicro and the Tawanese manufacturers like Asus and GigaByte. There might also be something interesting from Tyan, but their stuff is hard to come by around here. Same goes for GigaBytes' and Asus' servers. Supermicro is therefore pretty much the only available option.
Here's what I can get for under 5K$, combined to making a sales manager bleed and making him beg for mercy :
- 1x Supermicro 7048R-C1R4+
- 1x Intel Xeon E5-2670 v3 (12 cores/24 threads, 2.3GHz, 30MB cache)
- 4x Samsung 16GB DDR4 2133MHz ECC RDIMM (64GB total)
- 2x Seagate Constellation ES.3 2TB LFF #ST2000NM0033 in RAID 1
- 1x Supermicro SuperDOM 64GB
And that is it. There's not enough RAM, the boot drive isn't in RAID1 and the storage pool just plain sucks, but it's all I can fit inside 5 Grands. At least, they have an 8-bay SFF drive cage linked to a very potent RAID adapter, so they'll be able to add faster storage later on, should they need it. There's still space for 6 more nearline storage drives (albeit SATA ones) if they need additional low-io storage. BTW, I know that the v4 of the Seagate constellation is out, but the 2TB model is ~50$ more expensive per drive and that would have blown the budget.
The CPU is too much for the beginning, but you have to go for at least the E5-2650 v3 if you want the RAM to operate at 2133MHz, otherwise, you're stuck at 1866MHz. That's why I didn't go for 2x E5-2630 v3 instead.
I could also have saved ~350$ by opting for the Supermicro 7048R-TR, but then they would have been stuck with just 8x LFF SATA drives for their storage. So the server would have permanently sucked reagarding the storage iops. By investing into the 7048R-C1R4+, the storage sluginess is at least curable later on. They get 4 gigabit Ethernet ports as a bonus too, which might be useful eventually.
The closest big brand model in term of price and features is the Lenovo TD350. Similarly configured, mainly because the RAM is slightly more expensive and the storage too, it inflates to ~5700$CDN. It looks like a very nice server, but it simply doesn't fit in.
Agreeing with my choices?
