Ask HN: Buying servers?

You can save a lot of money by going with the sales guy. Just be sure he knows that you are growing and you'll be placing a big order every few months.<p>First go to the Dell website and price out the equipment. Then when you're speaking to the sales guy, tell him you priced it out on the website and it came out to about 88% of the actual price the site gave you.<p>Then tell him you've heard that talking to the sales guy is the way to start a business relationship and that you were hoping he could quote it out for you. Tell him you're ready to make the purchase decision immediately but the pricing has to make sense. Tell him the pricing on the website looks like it's marked up quite a bit.<p>It may take him a day or more to generate the quote.<p>Be aware that he has tremendous room to wiggle on some items, but not on others. Last order I placed the salesman could discount heavily some items but not others. You don't really care as long as the overall price makes sense. So when you eventually go over the quote with him, be sure to focus on your "budget" for the equipment, and not on where the specific pricing comes from.<p>You should also have a simultaneous dialog like this going with a rep from any other companies you'd buy from.<p>To the salesperson, the equation is effort vs time. If he knows you're ready to buy soon, then he has every incentive to make you a good deal b/c in a day the sale will be made and so he'll be willing to take a small commission in exchange for a quick sale. He has some constraints about how he can price items, but has a lot of flexibility on price.<p>If you're buying 10 to 20 servers you should be looking at least a 25% discount off of the website price. The only reason they publish those prices is to give the salesperson a starting point to work down from (or to sucker naive shoppers into paying full price via the web).<p>You want to come across as decisive and ready to buy at all times, if only he can solve the "issues with the pricing".<p>Frankly Dell's sales process stinks, and it is annoying to have to work with some of the salespeople there. But I've saved a substantial amount of money over the web prices by negotiating with them, so it's worth it.<p>You may also be able to save money by modifying some of the configurations slightly, b/c Dell lets salespeople discount based on the need to move inventory.<p>Don't be afraid to tell the salesperson it's OK if he needs to ask permission from his manager to make the deal, but that you're eager to get the order placed today. Tell him he can put you on hold while he speaks to the manager.<p>Good luck!

We've tried several vendors at Justin.tv, but we always end up circling back to Dell. Pricing is great, spare parts are readily available on Ebay, and they're quality machines. Definitely get in touch will their sales guys and plan your purchase for the end of the month, or better yet, end of the quarter.<p>You're making the right choice on 1U 8-core boxes. We've done the math and there's no better combination of price, performance, density, and power consumption out there.<p>-Kyle

(A) Lease vs. Buy: If you can swing it, lease them instead - tax benefits, etc.<p>(B) Do you really need 8 cores per box? I.e., you can get used dual-dual machines a lot cheaper than 50% of the price of the dual-quad machines.<p>(C) If you know what you want and are buying new then going with a white box builder is significantly cheaper than buying from Dell/HP/etc. I've been pretty happy with ASA especially since they've delivered/picked-up/serviced machines directly to/from/in our colo but there are plenty of decent vendors and they most end up using SuperMicro-based systems anyways.<p>(D) Do you really need 1U? Why? Power/cooling issues are putting more constraints on things than size at many places and a 2U is often cheaper, more flexible, fixable, etc.<p>(E) Really knowing exactly what you want can make a big difference in talking with the salespeople. Buying at the end of the quarter is a good thing if you can swing it.<p>(F) More ram is more better and 32GB is the current sweet spot in terms of lots of memory for a good price. Pay particular attention to the motherboards that you're considering as there can be a price premium at the various steps depending on if you need the flexibility to upgrade the memory a lot later.<p>(G) You mention that disk isn't much of a concern. Is that because you just want lots of compute nodes or because you're putting everything into a NAS/SAN or what?

So, some lessons learned...<p>1. lights out management matters<p>2. ensure your OS is happy on the hardware ahead of time<p>3. if you are expecting to make regular purchases, with growth for example, tell the vendor that<p>4. always negotiate<p>5. dell actually makes good servers now<p>6. look hard at the power density you get wherever your servers will live and factor cost of rack space into server cost numbers -- if you have low power density, slightly pricier servers with lower power reqs may win out

Hah. I know this one. Ok. first, are you willing to use a wrist strap, to buy an anti-static mat and verify you are grounded?<p><a href="http://prgmr.com/~lsc/luke_opterons.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://prgmr.com/~lsc/luke_opterons.jpg</a> (my setup)<p>If you are not, stop right now and take someone else's advice about how to get a good deal out of dell and HP (me, I can't afford dell and hp prices... my business model cant take that kind of markup on the ram. Dell and HP have OK deals on the base server, but you get screwed if you fill it with ram.)<p>Ok, you have the wrist strap and the dissapative mat? Ok, now first the ram. If you want 32GB ram, remember that 4GB modules cost twice as much per gigabyte as 2gb modules. this means you really want a board with 16 ram slots.<p>Second, the hardest part of assembling a computer is fitting the motherboard into the case and designing the cooling. Me, I buy SuperMicro SuperServers where that sort of thing is alrealdy done. It probably costs me $200 extra over some homebrew solution, but it saves me time and gives me a better finished product.<p>Here is the computer I settled on:<p><a href="http://supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1021/AS-1021TM-T+.cfm" rel="nofollow">http://supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1021/AS-1021TM-T+.cfm</a><p>Now, just search around for the lowest prices. if you are buying 20, you can call salesjerks, but my experience has been that they spend a <i>lot</i> of your time (time that I can bill out for close to $100/hr) and almost never give you a better deal on parts (remember, the salesguy wants to get paid, too.)<p>I got the aformentioned case from newegg for around $1200.<p>Next, do the same with CPUs. I ended up buying quad-core opteron HE chips at 1.9ghz for $260 or so each on newegg again.<p>Now, for ram, I very rarely beat the price on shop.kingston.com. They have a nice thing for finding the ram that fits your motherboard, and a good warranty.<p>the 2 servers in that photo? they take 1u of rackspace, around 350 wats power, and the whole ball of wax, for 2 servers, each with 8 cores and 32GB ram and 2x1TB disks, came in at under $5000.<p>But again, if you are unwilling to use anti-static equipment, buy the servers from a reputable vendor, and never open them.

Yes, you will get better deals by talking to a sales person, ESPECIALLY in about 2 weeks (as the quarter and year are coming to a close and people are trying to make their numbers).<p>Make it clear that you know the value of what you are after and are ready to make a purchase as soon as you find the right deal.

I like Sun servers, they can be expensive, but you can get some good deals if you are accepted into SSE (Sun Startup Essentials). For me one of the best things about them is the ILOM, which is badass as far as I'm concerned. Also, their N1 System manager lets you manage and provision a bunch of servers from a single location. It will also keep track of the environment on all of them, but thats nothing you couldn't build with SNMP traps etc. Also, I must mention that if you pay for the support, it is awesome, I had a problem with system drives on a Friday, and they overnighted it and I had it Saturday. They also don't charge you unless you don't send the defective part back, with THEIR free packaging and shipping. It was also nice of them to include 3-4 3M anti-static wrist straps with my shipment of new hardware :)

Supermicro servers have served me very well. All of our clusters at engineyard.com are built on supermicro 1u's with 32gig ram and 8cores. Highly recommended.

Amazon EC2 has a large VM if you don't want to purchase or lease hardware yet:<p>"Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform"<p>$0.80/hour - about $730/month.

Lots of great comments so not much add/kinda like others have said:<p>When dealing direct with vendors (Dell, Sun and IBM from experience):<p>1) Price you're given is not only based on current purchase, but future purchase. Telling your sales rep 'I need X servers now, but I expect to need a further X per quarter growing to X after X time' then they'll fight harder for your business. Basically, present your business as a growth opportunity to the vendor.<p>2) When speaking to your first sales rep, ask at what price/order level they generally deal in. The reps who handle bigger clients have access to bigger discounts.<p>3) Don't under or over-specify your machines without calculating your later options. Buying an extra processor for one machine now will be a hell of a lot cheaper/easier than buying the matching processor in 3/6/12 months. In the same respect, not buying that extra processor now might be more prudent because a new chassis with the latest and greatest processor in 6/12/24 months might be a better option. (should be part of your scalability predictions anyway).<p>4) Know your stuff.<p>4.1) We all know reps bs, by knowing what you're talking about you can reduce this tedium.<p>4.2) If you ask which processor is better, then it'll always be the more expensive one (or more importantly, the one with the better margin for them which is not always the most expensive).<p>4.3) mmmurf said it, but to re-iterate. Time = Money. If a rep is holding your hand too much, then you won't get as good deals.<p>5) Know your vendor and their enemies. 5.1) When is there end of quarter? 5.2) How have they done compared to comparable vendors over the last quarter, year, etc? 5.3) Which vendors are pushing X line/type of servers at the moment? 5.4) Have comparison quotes.<p>6) Specify a date when you will be looking to purchase. 5.1 has a MASSIVE impact on this.

I used to do IT Consulting and was responsible for procuring hardware from dell at a few companies including now my own.<p>What I learned - End of Quarter yields huge savings at Dell. If you are going to buy 10 servers for sure, create an account, spec out one server and call in to the small business division. Ask the salesman what he can do if you buy 5 of the one in your cart, he will give you a number let him know you have to talk to your partner put him on hold or call back. Then ask what he can do if you buy 10 - watch the price go down again on the quote.

We have a smattering of 100-150 HP DL380s and BL460c blades. We've seen approximately a 5% infant mortality rate (DOA or issues in the first 90 days). Depending on the channel HP's custom configurations come as a base and add on accessories -- if you order a dual 5160 DL380 with 32G of ram and 4x146g SAS you might get a preassembled 1x5160 4G 1x146 and a CPU, 14 2g DIMMS, and 3 disks, each in a separate shipping carton. You then spend about one person day per two computers unpacking individual components from cardboard and shipping foam boxes and installing CPUs, DIMMs, and disks. It's not my favorite thing to do, and it means that you only get about three computers per pallet. It's also, of course, not burnt-in beforehand, so you get to rack and memtest them for a day or two yourself.<p>In contrast we've had really good luck with a regional whitebox VAR -- they would assemble Intel reference platforms and Supermicro systems, burn them in, and ship them, assembled, in the one box the case came in. As far as I know we've had closer to a 1% failure rate over three years with these (exclusive of HD failures but not environmental, over-heat, issues).<p>On balance it's a tough call, because HP (and I assume Dell) have a much slicker lights-out-management solution than the last IPMI demo I saw. Maybe the whiteboxes have improved, but I assume the HP machines are still easier to support.

I can second the Supermicro solution. Worked for a hosting company in the past and we never had a Super Micro machine fail. They cost less and are built a lot beefier than comparable Dell's.

You may consider 8anet.com. You can customize the server according to your needs. They also setup for you the server for 20 or 50 dollars. I don't remember exactl

For whitebox vendor you might want to look at Supermicro<p>Cheers

go on eBay, lots of refurbished stuff there, a guy I know buys all his stuff from one user.<p>Me personally, I prefer to just lease them