I did find this shop in Texas: http://www.swt.com/ they do great machine. But it is difficult to get them in Belgium (shipping, question of waranty, insurance,…). does any of you got some good shop around that doesnt charge your first-born soul for the priviledge to buy from them?
why do simple coders think they have knowledge of hardware?
GO TO SUPERMICRO.com
They have the BEST servers, hands down. They even have a 1U server that actually has 2 seperate servers, compressed into 1U of space. They really do amazing stuff.
If you they are trying to lock you into their hardware (VENDOR LOCK IN) then screw that.
Ive bought 6 supermicro servers and have NEVER had issues as u described. So, look for good supermicro servers and websites that sell them. As always google the seller to and read reviews and look to see they are not a scam site. Get yout Barebones system, mem, drives, cpu and you should be good.
I hope everyone knows that what Jeff atwood got vendor locked IN, and this is not acceptable, by any standards.
Good luck and happy holidays.
lol, so apple aren’t the only scumbags with a proprietary tax?
Oh, we talked to IBM that a new suse linux installation does not support their raid any longer (but IBM had proposed to use 10.x instead of 9.x). Nearly 4 hours later (21:00) an IBM engineer was at the machine and installed a new driver on the first of many machines…
It all comes done to service level agreements in the end. And how valuable you are as a customer. IBM is good if your time costs more than a bit of money.
Welcome to the wonderful world of PC servers. You got near-component-cost pricing on the server case, motherboard, powersupply and such, but IBM had to find a profit somewhere in there. They did it via the drive sled trick (they’d also have been happy to sell you memory and CPU parts at a fairly high markup as well). It’s not uncommon; all the big guys do it.
That’s how they finance the RD that went into the case, mobo, management software, and support infrastructure which differentiate this system from a $700 tower system of similar specs. And it does need to be different; the tower system would plug into one enthusiast’s desk. The rackmount server system must plug into a datacenter which has very different operational requirements.
Sucks that you had to find this out the hard way, Jeff. As many others have pointed out, SuperMicro is the compromise solution for those of us who aren’t putting up dozens or hundreds of systems and amortizing them out over 5+ year lifespans.
Not to be mean, but this is what you get for choosing to buy and doing it yourself with no prior experience.
Jeff, just fabricate your own. As you said yourself…
a href=http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001185.htmlJust whip out your trusty dremel (you do own a dremel, right?)/a
Obviously I can’t even follow simple instructions.
No HTML, OK.
Beginners mistake.
Same Problem as I had with HP. As I can see in the comments - all big server-firms (Dell, HP, IBM, FSC{?}) do the same: selling overpriced hdds in their trays
And this is why google and such used commodity hardware.
This is an easy fix, and you’re not a true geek unless you can find the part number. But I’ll spare you and post the part number on Monday when I’m back at work. We buy these chassis all the time, and then stock them up with our own disks by purchasing the separate drive caddy from Infiniti Micro or another supplier.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). You get complete control over your VM, as much or little machine as you need, Windows Server is supported (I don’t want it, but I suspect Jeff does), EBS is on a SAN, and if your machine goes down, it should take you about five minutes to get it back up. It’s not even more expensive than other less capable hosting providers.
Let someone else worry about the hardware; you worry about your app.
I don’t think the only difference between consumer and
enterprise stuff is simply the price, but additional QA testing.
There’s a bit more to it than that. Some years ago I got to play with a bunch of spare IBM 0662 1GB SCSI drives (that tells you roughly how long ago it was). Most of them were generic PC drives and one was an RS/6000 server drive. All were exactly the same model number, type, date of manufacture, everything else, the only difference was that one was intended for generic PC use and the other for server use (and presumably cost 5x as much).
Running some sort of performance benchmark on them (and again I can’t remember what it was, too long ago) all of the drives except one performed at about the same level. One drive had 2-3x the performance on whatever synthetic benchmark this was. No prizes for guessing which one.
Actually, IBM will embed specific firmware strings in their hardware peripherals to ensure that third party peripherals can’t be used with IBM servers. I have personally experienced this in the pSeries and iSeries servers with both disks and RAM. However, those peripherals will work with any other equipment accounting for bus and interface compatibility. I used to use 9GB SCSI disks from an AS/400 in my home PC. Fortunately, IBM doesn’t use this vendor lock in behaviour with the xSeries.
Anyways, I promised the drive caddy part number so here it is:
IBM 42R4131
Google the above to buy them for $35 each.
While you’re at it, I suggest the following upgrade to get some decent performance from those disks.
Since the on-board RAID controller has pathetic performance replace it with an LSI to get great throughput and battery backup:
LSI Megaraid SAS 8408E
You’ll need the SAS backplane to card cable which Adaptec can supply:
Adaptec ACK-L-mSASX4-SASX4-0.5m R
SFF-8087 to SFF-8484
0.5 meter.
Make sure that you use 15K RPM SAS disks, instead of 7200RPM SATA disks. Yes, you can use SAS or SATA disks in these chassis.
Jeff:
Even if you could get the brackets for these, IBM/Lenovo (as of I think the X41 and later) began returning error codes on the boot of their laptops when you add a non-IBM hard drive. Sucks. I’d be willing to bet they do this with servers, too.
I will also say that you probably want to NOT use your own components in a server. +1 to Two Cents here. He has a VERY valid point. This goes DOUBLE when talking about RAM. I once bought SimpleTech, then Kingston RAM for my ProLiant database server about 7 years ago. 100% guaranteed by SimpleTech (and by Kingston) to work in my model of server. Crashed hard with a RAM error randomly. When I switched brands (SimpleTech to Kingston), the same thing happened a week later. All to save $2000 on memory. $2000 is nothing when it comes to your business’s critical operations. DON’T SKIMP here. This is the bitter voice of experience talking – and the voice of a man who’s built his own whitebox computers since the mid-90’s.
Servers really are a different animal.
As someone who had worked in the enterprise storage industry for many years, I’d like to offer my take on why storage vendors try to ensure you use their hardware.
Obviously, the answer is money. But not how you think.
They spend a LOT of money on hardware qualification. Many months and even years of testing goes into each and every product. In order to keep quality high and make deadlines you must limit the variations on hardware that you test. This means picking two or three hard drive vendors and a few models from each. And we found issues. Lots. Some were issues that you may never notice but are a true danger to your data. We had vendors provide us with specific firmware for their drives that fixed issues we found and those fixes may not make it into the consumer level firmware or firmware for other vendors.
You may say So what, let me just use my drives anyway, I’ll accept the risks!. OK, fair enough. Problem is that when customers run into an issue, they don’t say By the way, I’m using unapproved drives. Enterprise customers expect reliability and very prompt issue resolution when they do run into issues. Technical support teams engage upper level technical support, and even engineering very quickly to try and resolve customer issues. Many valuable resources can be spent before you realize that the customer is doing something that cannot be supported. I can’t tell you how many times I was pulled off my current project to go and try and replicate customer issues. This often involved gathering hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware and many hours of engineering time setting up a similar environment as the customer’s. This often involved impacts to the deadlines of products under development. The true cost of this cannot be measured.
So, in my personal opinion, if you do want the freedom to use your own mixed-and-matched components, well more power to you. But do it by building your own server and you AND the those large server vendors can both avoid the headache all together.
(Disclaimer: these opinions are my own. I no longer work in the enterprise storage industry.)
Hi,
To reiterate what Marc said, why not EC2? Perhaps not in this case, perhaps you have good reasons not to go that route, but in general I’ve come to think that it just doesn’t make economical sense NOT to use EC2/S3.
I’m no expert, but for smaller to mid sized sites I don’t think there’s any way anyone could haggle better data rates than Amazon can. Please let me know if I’m completely misguided here. (And I’m not talking those BS sites that offer tera-bytes for 5$/month.)
And although the instances aren’t super cheap, they’re comparable to hosting charges. And throw in the total costs you’d incur if you hit just a couple hardware failures a year, and I think you’re coming out pretty close to even.
And life is short: I’d pay a couple bucks a month to have Amazon vet, hire, and employ competent people that know what they’re doing and can actually fix things promptly. If my instance goes down I can just re-instance it and I’m back. And when the entire system goes down, which does rarely happen, everyone is affected, and they have smart people working on it, guaranteed.
I’d love to be able to validate my preference for owning hardware, just because I generally like to control EVERYTHING I can, but sadly I don’t think it makes much economic sense anymore with the economies of scale that Amazon can achieve.
So, if anyone could let me in on some reasons why owning servers still makes economic sense (in the general case, I’m sure there are corner cases that require ownership), I’d love to hear them.
And good luck with your brackets. (amazon ftw!)
Ah, I see this was already somewhat addressed: