We think we want to buy a server for our office, but have no idea how to go about it.<p>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.<p>In the office, we all use Mac Minis running Ubuntu or laptops running OSX.<p>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.<p>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 <i>crawls</i>.<p>We've tried testing remotely on a clone of the live setup, but the save-code-to-seeing-results latency's a killer.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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?<p>Thanks!
Toby