A New Member of The Family
I get asked every now and then which PC manufacturer I would recommend. It's normally friend, family or neighbour asking and they normally want something simple for the home. I always tell them to avoid places like PC World and head straight for Dell. I've only ever bought one thing one from - a laptop - but it's well built, tech support is good and their prices are amazing. A couple of people have taken me up on this advice and they all seem happy so far.
As you all probably know by now, I've just moved in to a new house and have been busy setting up my only little SOHO environment. To improve things a little more I had been thinking of a new server for a while now. Today I ordered one.
For the past 3 years I've "made do" with a pair of IBM xSeries 200 eServers. They were cheap, they've done a good job, but it's time to move on. My plan is to replace them with a few rack servers, which I can bolt to a wall in a cupboard or something and keep out of the way.
To get things started I ordered a Dell PowerEdge 750 today. For just £670 (ex VAT) I got 320GB of storage and 512MB RAM with a Intel Celeron (ding, ding, dong, ding) processor at 2.4GHZ. Not exactly an amazing spec. for that price, but more than adequate for its job as DNS/file server and Rockall PDC.
An added bonus of this purchase is that I now have a "spare" server. This will probably revert from Linux to Windows and be a test box for new Domino releases, .Net or whatever. Ultimately I want to get rid of both tower servers and will probably end up with 3 or 4 rack servers. Heck, at this price, I might end up with a whole farm of them!
More server talk to come over the next few days. You're welcome to chime in if you've got any advice or opinions. Are Dell really any good? Are towers better than racks? Do you care? I might even share with you the entertaining experience I had trying to buy this "business" kit from Dell. Then maybe I'll re-live the even more harrowing experience I had with IBM all those years ago.
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Dell are any good, yes. Not in the way they once were, with the screaming-fast top-of-the-line everything, but they do tend to put together reliable systems and have better-than-average tech support. If you had to centrally manage a boatload of workstations, they'd be an even better bet due to "image stability" (only IBM comes close, really).
As for towers vs. racks; it's a matter of space. Towers can be more robust than racks, but then you're stuck with a bunch of towers. Racks, on the other hand -- do I actually have to explain how one can mount several machines in a rack? Towers are certainly a lot easier to work on if you're the sort who needs to constantly swap components, and you can cram a lot more disks into the average tower (something that's becoming less and less significant with each passing day). If your environment is a bit dodgy temperature-wise, then the usually-better cooling of towers can be significant, too. In practical terms, though, with reasonably-modern equipment in a stay-home developers' environment, use what's available. (My "servers" include a Celeron 333 and a PII 266. Would I run a large office from them? No. Do they give me a good idea of what to expect from an application when I attack them with a couple of hundred browsers? You betcha.)
Pizza boxes need good cooling that normally comes from having them installed in a rack with fan forced air running through it.
Upgradability can also be an issue - you can't normally fit more than 2 drives in a 1U server but for your needs, I suspect this will never be an issue.
If I were investing money in new hardware for my home office, I'd be buying towers - easier to upgrade and more robust when playing around inside them, makes them the obvious choice to me - rack mount is more suited to "deploy and forget".
Brand? At the end of the day, servers are servers are servers - other than the facia and logo (and rack mounting hardware in your case) its just another box to install an OS and apps on. Ultimately support and "how easy is it to do business with them?", is the more important thing as you yourself alude to. Reliability or quality of components is not an issue across brands, in my opinion.
That PowerEdge is a great little server - Dell machines look great too. I got most envious recently in a data centre where we have some machines - I spied a wall of gray complete with brite blue flashing LEDs! :) They make pretty smooth looking racks as well.
Are you planning to have a Workplace able server? The buzz all around is RAM RAM RAM. So while 512k does it for your one man Domino, WP would want 1-2GB (or more). Any plans?
:-) stw
I should have mentioned this earlier, but Dell were recently/ are doing a "buy one server, get another identical spec for £1" offer, if you picked a server from their Medium to Large business area. Myself and another guy are awaiting delivery of our Poweredge 700's (2.8 P4/ 512Mb/ 80Gb SATA) AND a 17" TFT monitor, which we split the total and paid £500 each for.
They have different offers on their small business section, so you can't spec up a server from there and add £1, but you can get a pretty good system from their medium/large business area.
We wouldn't have paid what we did for one system at that price, but for two it's killer.
The offer had "allegedly" expired when me and my buddy enquired, but they didn't seem to notice, although if you've already placed your order Jake it might be too late. You never know though...
Dell produces solid, well prized computers. Why do I not buy them?
Because I do not like the Dell Business Model. I even prefer the IBM (and others) Business Partner concept as it just involves more people. Dell is cheap because there are little people selling lots of computers from a central location directly to customers (I might be biased because I once worked for a large Distributor). Unfortunately the concept works and it is hard to get the same value for your money from others.
Thanks guys.
The server I ordered is just a file-server and so no real need for loads of RAM. When I save up enough to by my dev server then I might cater for things like Websphere with +2GB of RAM.
I might share the story of buying this server tomorrow. Makes for a funny read.
I used to be a huge fan of Dell until they moved their call center to India. I called them recently to purchase a new machine and gave up after five minutes of poor quality voice comms (major lag). Most upset :-(