Ask HN: Buying servers?

http://prgmr.com/~lsc/luke_opterons.jpg (my setup)

If you are not, stop right now and take someone else's advice about how to get a good deal out of dell and HP (me, I can't afford dell and hp prices... my business model cant take that kind of markup on the ram. Dell and HP have OK deals on the base server, but you get screwed if you fill it with ram.)

Ok, you have the wrist strap and the dissapative mat? Ok, now first the ram. If you want 32GB ram, remember that 4GB modules cost twice as much per gigabyte as 2gb modules. this means you really want a board with 16 ram slots.

Second, the hardest part of assembling a computer is fitting the motherboard into the case and designing the cooling. Me, I buy SuperMicro SuperServers where that sort of thing is alrealdy done. It probably costs me $200 extra over some homebrew solution, but it saves me time and gives me a better finished product.

Here is the computer I settled on:

http://supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1021/AS-1021TM-T+.cfm

Now, just search around for the lowest prices. if you are buying 20, you can call salesjerks, but my experience has been that they spend a lot of your time (time that I can bill out for close to $100/hr) and almost never give you a better deal on parts (remember, the salesguy wants to get paid, too.)

I got the aformentioned case from newegg for around $1200.

Next, do the same with CPUs. I ended up buying quad-core opteron HE chips at 1.9ghz for $260 or so each on newegg again.

Now, for ram, I very rarely beat the price on shop.kingston.com. They have a nice thing for finding the ram that fits your motherboard, and a good warranty.

the 2 servers in that photo? they take 1u of rackspace, around 350 wats power, and the whole ball of wax, for 2 servers, each with 8 cores and 32GB ram and 2x1TB disks, came in at under $5000.

But again, if you are unwilling to use anti-static equipment, buy the servers from a reputable vendor, and never open them.

I use SuperMicros but I just redirect console over serial (they can do this even for the BIOS setup, nearly all 'server' boards can) then I hook the serial to another server with a $5 USB to rs232 dongle (or to a terminal server in the case of racks with a lot of servers)

then you want a remote rebooter. You want that even with DRAC, 'cause DRAC isn't particularly reliable.

* EC2 servers can be deployed quickly and cheaply - you don't have to overspend on hardware to meet an upper bound of predicted demand. The original poster needed between 10 and 20 machines - if he only needs 10 but purchases 20 he wastes $25k.

* Co-location fees are included

* Features like elastic IPs, elastic block storage, and security groups make managing machines easier.