But at what price? I was hoping to get something close to the cost of the parts. From the research I've done, you end up paying a big premium for server hardw

But at what price? I was hoping to get something close to the cost of the parts. From the research I've done, you end up paying a big premium for server hardware, and especially so if you have someone do the OS installation for you. SuperMicro looks like it provides every configuration under the sun, which drives the price way up. The appeal of OpenCompute is that if you know they're running 10,000 copies of this exact configuration, the kinks are likely to be worked out. It isn't trivial to do this work yourself, even though I've built normal PCs before. Good blog post on building your own: https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/