Are dell 2950 iii still worth it?

Mynight

Mynight

Mynight

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Found a bargain (well I think);

2 x 3.0ghz quad core x5450
12gb ram
2x 73gb 15k sas
Dual psu
Perc 6/i

For £180.

Basically I'm just looking for a server to learn how to manage my own dedicated as I'm getting to the stage where my vps is getting a bit tight on resources.

I would assume this is more powerful than my vps anyway and as such may be a slight stepping stone. (2 cores on a Xeon e5 don't know which and 4gb ram).

Would this be a suitable platform to learn management on before I spend big money on the latest and greatest?

(Bandwidth is already sorted)
 
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For £180 that's a steal.

They can be loud if ran at high load. But seriously, there are still parts about and Origin still do drives with the caddies.
 
I heard they can be quite noisy from searching up on them. Sure I can get over the noise.

I may as well go for it. Need to find a gpu for virtualisation as well at some point.

Good to hear they still do parts :)
 
they certainly arent the quietest machines, even in an air conditioned server room. they're a headache when running hot.

we still have a load in live environments and they're pretty indestructible.
 
we had about 20 of them in a server room where the air con failed once.

you could hear the server room from a 2 floors away.
 
Hmm maybe I should water cool it then haha.

Right one question I'm completely googled out (obviously not using right keywords). The processors don't support EPT http://ark.intel.com/m/products/344...3_00-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB#@product/specifications

Is that going to cause an issue for vmware? primarily it will run osx as a shared vm eventually.

Any ideas?

EDIT:balls found out I can only virtualise 32bit machines without ept :(
 
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It's a couple of generations old now - I would probably think about whether you need an actual server or whether a desktop system and a modern i7 might be better.

You're probably looking at 1.5-2A power draw for that machine, so if it's going to be on for an extended period or 24 hours a day, you're going to break even on a more expensive, but more power efficient modern system very quickly. You're basically looking at about 5-6 KWH per day for this server which is getting on for something like £0.80 per day in electricity.
 
Per CPU Benchmark, dual X5450 procs produce a score of 7843. My brother just bought a Dell Optiplex with an i5-4670 which has a score of 7483, and consumes probably 5% of the power, and being Haswell enjoys all the latest goodies (so virtualisation would be no problem). This cost him around £450, so not quite £180, but in my opinion there is no comparison -- PowerEdge: noise, heat, power consumption, slow, outdated, Optiplex: small, quiet, low power consumption. Oh, and the Optiplex has a 3 year warranty, too.

There are plenty of alternative configs, this particular example is just fresh in my mind because it happened today. The point is, I just don't see the point in buying these ancient production servers, apart from the fact that they are actual servers, everything else about them is just not worth it.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
 
I do see what you're saying and I do agree. Reason I'm looking at cheap servers was ideally to get to grips with the software (which I guess I could do on my desktop for now) before splurging the big money for a big boy server later down the line.

At the moment my vps caters for a website and a mobile apps backend. I expect to grow this considerably and looking at dedicated server costs I could afford to buy my own at the same price as 12 months of hosting.

I'm looking for an intro into servers basically to see if I'm up to the job of running my own or I just pay to host elsewhere. Bandwidth isn't an issue which normally stops people considering own servers and there's multiple power sources where I plan on installing.

I believe I would also enjoy learning somthing new :)
 
I have one in my garage and honestly it's so loud you can hear it from the road. Don't often use it anymore to be honest.
 
Mynight said:
I do see what you're saying and I do agree. Reason I'm looking at cheap servers was ideally to get to grips with the software (which I guess I could do on my desktop for now) before splurging the big money for a big boy server later down the line.

At the moment my vps caters for a website and a mobile apps backend. I expect to grow this considerably and looking at dedicated server costs I could afford to buy my own at the same price as 12 months of hosting.

I'm looking for an intro into servers basically to see if I'm up to the job of running my own or I just pay to host elsewhere. Bandwidth isn't an issue which normally stops people considering own servers and there's multiple power sources where I plan on installing.

I believe I would also enjoy learning somthing new :)
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I do understand your point, but honestly there's not that much to learn. You'll be spending £180 to learn something in a few days and then you'll wonder what the big deal was. If you think you are ready for a dedicated server for your site, then go for it! You will still have your VM, so you don't have to cut over immediately.

In terms of running your own, do you mean from your garage? 'Cause I would strongly recommend against that for anything you are charging money for; just so much hassle for the responsibility towards your customers. The only people that buy and host their own servers are big companies -- datacenters are massively expensive to set up and run; everyone else pays a hosting company.

You can still have your own dedicated server, it just belongs to the hosting company.

If you are talking about learning how to configure and manage the server software (i.e. OS, Apache, MySQL, etc), just install VMware on your laptop/PC (or use Hyper-V if you have Windows 8.1) and play with that. Costs you nothing and gives you exactly the same experience.
 
Won't be a garage job, it's being set up at the office which has multiple broadband lines and I think 3 different power sources so its about as stable as it will get (not cost to myself for now).

Main reason I am considering my own is the price for hosting dedicated after 12 months it will have paid for my own server so anything after that is wasted money in my opinion. If its that easy to manage a server that is.

Good idea about setting up in a vm to learn. I'll go with that for now to test the water :) thank you.
 
I may just stick with hosting it for now and learn via vm as suggested. If I find myself capable and I outgrow the low end dedicated as well I may revisit running my own in future.

Thanks for advise everyone :)
 
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