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I had Dell's 24x7x365 4 hour, on-site service contract for a rack of 16 identical 1U servers. "4 hours" was for them to respond to my call (phone or email, I ca

by bestes 15y ago

I had Dell's 24x7x365 4 hour, on-site service contract for a rack of 16 identical 1U servers. "4 hours" was for them to respond to my call (phone or email, I can't remember). Their response was not showing up on-site with the part, but asking me to run a long series of tests, including brining the machine down, swapping out parts, resetting the BIOS, etc. Once I did all that, they ordered the part, then scheduled a delivery. It was 3-4 days, minimum, to get something fixed. For the $1,909 price per server: I followed the link to Dell's site and tried to configure the R515 for myself. I added the second processor and left it set to the worse one, added the cheapest 16GB memory option, the redundant power supply and rails. That was $1,999. A single, 250GB HD seems a bit "lite" for a server, even for one that does mostly processing. I didn't look into the networking or anything. I'm guessing at least another $1k to make it reasonable, probably more like $2k.

thwarted 15y ago
A single, 250GB HD seems a bit "lite" for a server, even for one that does mostly processing. I've found that 250GB is way overkill for a machine that does mostly processing. Consider web servers, which need a copy of the code (which hopefully isn't over a gig), and the operating system install for a server should fit in under 10GB. The bulk of the data they'll be processing will be in remote services like databases. If you have a decent logging infrastructure setup, where you regularly ship all logs off the machine, you need enough storage space for the logs for the rotation period -- if you ship them off immediately (say with scribe), you need enough local storage for the period your aggregator is unavailable (which can be minimized by having even scribe log aggregation load balanced). If these machines are in clusters and you can survive with some of them being out, you don't even need RAID on them. It's kind of unfortunate that the smallest drive you can buy leaves it 80%+ empty, because I have a feeling that drives that were smaller and not optimized for speed and capacity, but still use modern technology, might be more reliable. We've taken to putting smallish SSDs in our load balancers and other machines that don't need a lot of local storage, since having fewer moving parts (now the only moving parts are the fans) is a power-usage and reliability win.
krobertson 15y ago
Regarding support.... When you get to the point of ordering several servers, it makes sense to just order a full spare. Standardize on a particular setup and keep a certain ratio. Then one box goes down, we just swap HDs to another standby chassis. Back up in 10-15 mins, then you go dig into the problems with the other chassis.

by bestes 15y ago

thwarted 15y ago

A single, 250GB HD seems a bit "lite" for a server, even for one that does mostly processing. I've found that 250GB is way overkill for a machine that does mostly processing. Consider web servers, which need a copy of the code (which hopefully isn't over a gig), and the operating system install for a server should fit in under 10GB. The bulk of the data they'll be processing will be in remote services like databases. If you have a decent logging infrastructure setup, where you regularly ship all logs off the machine, you need enough storage space for the logs for the rotation period -- if you ship them off immediately (say with scribe), you need enough local storage for the period your aggregator is unavailable (which can be minimized by having even scribe log aggregation load balanced). If these machines are in clusters and you can survive with some of them being out, you don't even need RAID on them. It's kind of unfortunate that the smallest drive you can buy leaves it 80%+ empty, because I have a feeling that drives that were smaller and not optimized for speed and capacity, but still use modern technology, might be more reliable. We've taken to putting smallish SSDs in our load balancers and other machines that don't need a lot of local storage, since having fewer moving parts (now the only moving parts are the fans) is a power-usage and reliability win.

krobertson 15y ago

Regarding support.... When you get to the point of ordering several servers, it makes sense to just order a full spare. Standardize on a particular setup and keep a certain ratio. Then one box goes down, we just swap HDs to another standby chassis. Back up in 10-15 mins, then you go dig into the problems with the other chassis.