Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, I've built one of those SuperMicro machines, with eight drives, around the beginning of the year. Allowing for redundancy (RAID 5 on six disks for data, and mirrored the boot drives), we ended up with 6.5TB of storage at about $3500 (that includes i7 proc and 12Gb RAM, and a fancy controller). My labor added some more on top of the $3500. Mostly, we've been happy. It is more sensitive to heat issues than our HP…
Yep, that spec would be over the top for a storage node, though. A large chunk likely went into the controller and the i7 whereas in a storage-node most cheapo controllers (i.e. 2x8 is cheaper than 1x16) and whatever old xeon/core2 will do. Wrt cooling, for actual servers (i.e. not storage nodes) we've had good success with Sun XFires, the 4100+ range. They are very well built and the markup over the SuperMicro junk…
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#111I second the 4100s. I had one on a loaner program, and they are sweet machines.