I've been out of the server hardware game for a while and a friend has asked me to spec on. I remember a few years back you could get an ML110 from HP for around £110 which was crappy spec but cheaply upgradeable. Budget is around £500 for a tower server, not including OS, so, if someone can help me with any deals / offers around then that would be great. Thanks
Any good server deals around at the mo?
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I have a HP microserver which I purchased on a cashback deal, they are still running, thy also had a HP tower mofel out to feed the cash back hunters who wanted a larger unit. You will have to check to see if the tower one is still running, I know the microserver one is.
Depends if you want a rack server of a small box like the HP mini-server.
I have just built a short depth rack server for a client for the equivalent of 1k (GBP) including my build fee and 7% GST (VAT equiv over here) but excluding hard drives.
Supermicro server case (CSE-813MTQ-600CB)
- 4x 2.5" or 3.5" SATA or SAS hard drives.
- Includes a 600W Gold PSU
- Short depth (19.8" rather than the more usual 25.6" meaning it can fit in some smaller network cabinets.
- C204 chipset based LGA1155 board
- Compatible with i3-2100 series or E3-1200 series Xeon processors
- Up to 32GB ECC ram
- 4xSATAII and 2xSATAIII ports
- Dual Gbe lan (Intel 82574L chipset)
- IPMI 2.0
- Inbuilt graphics chipset (Matrox G200eW 16MB DDR2)
- 4 Cores, 8 Threads
- 3.2GHz (3.6GHz burst)
- TDP 80W
- ECC supported
- No onboard video
- VT-x & VT-d support.
- Support for up to 8x 6Gbps drives over 2 ports
- Support for raid 0,1,10,00 (raid 5,50 with feature key installed).
- PCIe x8 2.0 interface giving up to 5GB/s throughput.
PCIe x8 1U riser card
Supermicro 1U CPU heatsink
1 set of SFF8087 (Controller) -< 4xSATA) cables with sideband.
The client was aware of the requirements of flashing the M1015 but the prices for the LSI or Areca cards were just too silly to entertain compared to a brand new M1015 flashed. The card is in a x8 physical but only x4 electrical PCIe slot but it is also only running 4 drives in the 1U case so bandwidth is not an issue.
The E3 Xeon is around the same price as the i5-2500K and around 50 GBP cheaper than the i7-2600 yet still has hyperthreading and all 4 cores active.
If you can find a local UK stockist then I would hope you should be able to get around the same sort of pricing even taking in to account the GST/VAT differences.
If you really do need to stick to the lower budget then you could look at a ATX PC case and PSU which will make a dent in the price as the rack mount Supermicro case is expensive. You could shave of more by reducing the ram size. Remove the M1015 and just use the onboard SATA connectors.
If that still does not do it you could take a look at the Intel S1200BT motherboards which should be a fair bit cheaper than the Supermicro ones.
Note the prices are based on my experience of distributor and retail pricing and only 7% tax but Singapore is not cheap for computer parts in any way. I would say it is pretty comparable to the UK, sometimes even when taking in to account the differences in GST/VAT %.
RB
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Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 requires minimum of 8GB of memory and in reality needs 10GB to run well.
Also quad core processor is really a minimum.
I have tried running it on cheaper dual core boxes and the results weren't great.
Tom
Also quad core processor is really a minimum.
I have tried running it on cheaper dual core boxes and the results weren't great.
Tom
SBS 2011 will install with 4GB, but you're right, the minimum requirement is 8Gb. That can be an upgrade for the future. At first shout, we're talking less than 10 users, so no biggy on the memory front, as long as it install. I remeber trying to evaluate with 2Gb and it wouldn't even install!!!