Rackmount Servers


Subject: Rackmount Servers
From: Mike Tibor (tibor@lib.uaa.alaska.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 23 2002 - 13:32:21 AKST


Have any of you purchased rackmount servers in the past year or so? Those
who have, did you go big name (Dell, Compaq, etc.) or did you buy from a
smaller vendor? Or did you build your own?

We started consolidating all of our servers into cabinets and racks a
couple of years ago, and the relatively high cost of big name hardware
resulted in me building the servers we have now using this 4u chassis:

  http://www.bonavio.com/chassis/bv-4u17.htm
  (the picture shows a beige chassis; we ordered black)

and good quality motherboards with Athlon cpus. I've been much happier
with these than with our two big name boxes (an HP Netserver and Dell
PowerEdge 4300; both big 8u boxes). The Dell has a cheesy plastic door on
the front that broke the first day we had it. It blew one of the power
supplies and two of the six hard disks have failed. The HP also suffers
from cheesy plastic, but also has all-around performance problems. In my
opinion a $10,000 server should run like a scalded monkey, period.

Despite being happy with our in house built servers, it does seem rather
tedious to build a server from the ground up when so many small vendors
are producing what by all accounts seems to be first-rate hardware.

One example that I recently stumbled onto is:

  http://bsdmall.eracks.com

You can have your choice of Intel or AMD cpus, IDE or SCSI. While I'm
looking for servers to run either Linux or FreeBSD, they will install
whatever OS you choose.

Last summer I was pricing out servers for a project and found that with
big name hardware I couldn't get below $5,000. Other vendors couldn't
seem to break the $3,000 mark. All offered only Intel cpus and SCSI disk
subsystems (not knocking SCSI of course, but I like options). I figured I
could build what we need for about $2,500, but then that doesn't count the
cost of my time. eRacks has single Athlon systems at around $1,000, dual
Athlon systems for under $2k, and dual Athlon SCSI systems for about
$2,200.

Very tempting considering the alternatives. What kind of experiences have
you guys had in this area?

Mike (bored at work on a Saturday)

-- 
Mike Tibor         Univ. of Alaska Anchorage    (907) 786-1001 voice
Network Technician     Consortium Library         (907) 786-6050 fax
tibor@lib.uaa.alaska.edu       http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/~tibor/
http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/~tibor/pgpkey  for PGP public key



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