Ask HN: How to buy an office server? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to buy an office server?

4 pointsgearhart4 comments

We think we want to buy a server for our office, but have no idea how to go about it.

We're an AWS team, we've never had a physical server before. We've got a scalable setup on AWS with 10 or so different types of machine ("layers") that make up our pipeline.

In the office, we all use Mac Minis running Ubuntu or laptops running OSX.

During development, we run a set of VMs on each of our local machines that gives us a scaled-down copy of the real system, and we feed very little data through it, so it can handle it.

Recently we've been adding layers to the system, though, and it's getting pretty out of hand. Whilst we can still run the VMs, even with tiny amounts of data flowing through it, it absolutely crawls.

We've tried testing remotely on a clone of the live setup, but the save-code-to-seeing-results latency's a killer.

We're thinking the solution is to get a nice big server with a few hundred gigs of RAM and a dozen processors or so, pop it in our office and offload the VMs onto that. Then we can share a disk with it over a hard wire, the latency will be nothing and it'll run like a dream.

The problem is, we know how to think about servers in the AWS sense (like (this)[http://www.ec2instances.info/?cost=monthly]) but there doesn't seem to be anyone selling servers like that, there are all these fragmented deals that say things like "up to 512Gb RAM" and talk about the types of processor, rather than their specs, and when you do find a good catalogue, it doesn't have any prices on it!

Does anyone know how we can find a server that suits our needs at a decent price? Has anyone done it before? Is there a whole world here that we simply don't understand?

Thanks! Toby

It's really a matter of deciding whether you want to buy prebuilt or just build it yourself.

For what it's worth, I find the former option is much better if you intend on having a large number of similarly spec-ed servers (since the vendor will have nice management tools designed to make your life easy) and the latter option is much better if you need very specific configurations (eg; bleeding-edge hardware) or you're reasonably competent at IT and want to save $$.

What's your budget?

If < $4k you'll want to go dual socket. Xeon E5's are topping out at 22 cores per socket nowadays. You'll find the price sweetspot around 12 cores/socket.

If > $5k you can go for the Xeon E5-4xxx series (which if you want to wait for Q2'16 are getting a slight speed bump) in the V4 models. You'll get up to 18 cores/socket but the price sweetspot is still around 12 cores/socket (gives you 96 logical threads in linux).

Most decent server motherboards for these processors will support 512GB+ DDR4 ECC RAM. Again, supermicro is a good bet. Just make sure it's a server and not workstation motherboard (it should have dedicated IPMI). If you're planning on running something storage intensive, spring for a MOBO with built-in SAS adapter.

Then you'll be better off dockerizing your application instead of spinning up a bunch of VM's. Why? You get easy shared access to disks, much lower overhead, you can easily use a cloud builder like quay.io, and if you want to deploy to AWS or your own server your code is guaranteed to run identically.

For what it's worth, I currently run highly networking and CPU bound trading programs in a containerized environment and it's been wonderful. Much easier than VM's and much lower overhead. Plus you can mess with the networking to your heart's content (made easy by using pipework).

If you're not comfortable building your own, I'd start with a workstation from Dell or HP (e.g. "Dell Precision Workstations"), choose the smallest amount of RAM they offer, then buy RAM yourself to get the amount you need (make sure the base machine supports that much RAM). Dell and HP always massively overcharge for RAM upgrades compared to the cost of buying it yourself.

In general you can't put a dozen processors in a server. You could get that many cores with something like two eight-core Xeon CPUs easily.

As I'm sure you know, you'll need to pre-select how much memory, storage, and CPU power you'll need. This offer may fit your needs. You'll find some specifications on this link, and there is an option to customize it. It may be useful to call their hotline and talk to a consultant.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-t630/pd

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