Half depth server

freemason

freemason

freemason

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I'm looking at getting a server. Just looking around at what is available but notice the one below is very deep and will not fit my 12u rack cabinet

*** no competitor links ***

Can you all give me some ideas of a good alternative that will fit my case can be 1u 2u or 3u case depth is circa 15inch cost of around £200 second-hand is acceptable
 
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It sounds like you have a comms cabinet rather than a server rack. None of the common servers are going to fit into that depth.

Saying you want a 'server' is really vague. You need to decide what it's going to be doing and spec it based on that.

Beware of older servers. They tend to use stupid amounts of electricity and are usually pretty loud.
 
ChrisD. said:
What are you doing with it? Servers, especially ones for £200, cost an arm and a leg to run and are far from quiet.
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This, and can tasks be split between servers, 2 HP N series fit neatly side by side on a shelf. The Gen 10 isn't reported to be great, the older ones tend to lack the processing power in standard form, although they can be modified (I'm not entirely sure which ones), and they can be picked up relatively cheaply.

Another thing to consider is that if you're struggling for space due to cabinet depth is will cooling be an issue?
 
A Dell R210II wouldn't be a bad choice, you can pick up the Xeon E3-1220 models for around that price and they are relatively low power draw. Not massively powerful and you won't be running tonnes of stuff from one but it may meet your criteria. Depth is fairly shallow for a 1U server but the fans can/will make some noise as they are only 40mm.
 
Would this have been better in the server forum? What is the server's intended function? Generally rack mount servers in the sub £200 bracket are going to be old, noisy, hot, inefficient and expensive to run.

Take a step back, think about what you actually want to do with this server, does it need even need to be local? You can get a VPS for less than your power bill for running anything you are going to get.
 
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Just buy a PC and put it on a shelf. There's nothing magical about rack servers as far as things a home user cares about is concerned.

Use a Synology for the fact it's an easy to use NAS, export an iSCSI LUN if you want storage to play around with on a NUC or whatever.
 
If it's just for NAS use then I can heartily recommend the QNAP TX-831Ue. It's about the same size as a 1U non-PoE switch and it even has SFP+ ports for 10GbE. It's not cheap, but it's robust, fast for file transfers and it will fit in the smallest cabinet.
 
We've got a Dell PowerEdge R420XR in some of our mobile comms boxes. Pretty sure its comms cab depth, and only 1U.

You might not need something quite as full on as that. Its also probably a lot more than £200 second hand due to the fact they aren't in abundance.
 
Conanius said:
We've got a Dell PowerEdge R420XR in some of our mobile comms boxes. Pretty sure its comms cab depth, and only 1U.

You might not need something quite as full on as that. Its also probably a lot more than £200 second hand due to the fact they aren't in abundance.
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Just come across the DL20 that is HP's equivalent for short racks - https://www.hpe.com/uk/en/product-c...hpe-proliant-dl20-gen9-server.1008556817.html

not cheap however as hasn't been available for long.

Best option is probably something from Supermicro:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/chassis_short_depth.cfm

Their short depth cases/whole servers are often used/rebranded for Firewall or anti-spam devices (e.g. search for "Appliance" in computer section), and can often be picked up cheap used (as the licenses expire etc).
 
ChrisD. said:
What are you doing with it? Servers, especially ones for £200, cost an arm and a leg to run and are far from quiet.
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Depends quite a bit on the server and how you have them configured ... as well as how modern it is which can drastically affect its power efficiency. I picked up a DL380 G7 the other day to do some homelab stuff with and with two 6-core CPUs (L5640, 60W TDP), 32GB and 4x 146GB SAS disks I don't think it bad at all. With the various options set to lower power use, installing a VM, under ESX 6.0u3, it was pulling <150W and the fans didn't go over 13% (which is quieter than the compressor on my fridge freezer at 5m).

Yes older servers were noisier and drunk power like it was going out of fashion but power management and hence heat and hence noise has improved a great deal.
 
memyselfandi said:
Depends quite a bit on the server and how you have them configured ... as well as how modern it is which can drastically affect its power efficiency. I picked up a DL380 G7 the other day to do some homelab stuff with and with two 6-core CPUs (L5640, 60W TDP), 32GB and 4x 146GB SAS disks I don't think it bad at all. With the various options set to lower power use, installing a VM, under ESX 6.0u3, it was pulling <150W and the fans didn't go over 13% (which is quieter than the compressor on my fridge freezer at 5m).

Yes older servers were noisier and drunk power like it was going out of fashion but power management and hence heat and hence noise has improved a great deal.
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I have a bit of experience with the 380's of varying vintages, but G7? C'mon that's well into power guzzling monster territory.

You have two CPU's that barely push 5K of CPU mark each for 150w which is circa 46.8p/day ((0.15kw x 24) x 13p) to run, my 13.7k CPU mark R1700/32GB box pulls about 15-17w with NAS/VM's/dockers running doing reasonable IO workloads and media processing using flash storage or in other words about 5.3p/day ((0.17 x 24) x 13p), in general a current gen intel would be even more efficient (intel are the masters of power gate). Based on that I pay £19.35 a year for power, you pay £170.82 and my performance per watt is way better, the story gets worse if you load it up with CPU intensive work. Multiply that (@151.47) over a few years and your residual's are likely minimal (look at say a G5 now, cost to ship/list/sell) and my hardware pays for itself and has resale value. The only time you buy an old inefficient 1366 based Xeon, is when power is free, or you hate the person paying the bill.
 
You are making assumptions.

- Yes a more modern server uses less power and has better performance ... but look at the price difference for a modern box compared with it. Even a £150/year price difference equates to many years of usage before you hit the cost of buying a more modern server with equivalent capacity.
- Pulling 150W is hardly guzzling ... I would imagine that there are many gamers on this forum have PCs which pull far more power and are probably on far longer ....
- .... because its not on 24x7 ... I have other systems which are and draw far less power. I have a requirement which means that I need to spin up a large number of VM on temporary basis but actually be able to install the OS on them (otherwise I'd just use AWS).

But you say you are running a R1700 ... I assume you mean you are running a Ryzen processor ... so are you actually running a server or just a glorified PC?
 
memyselfandi said:
You are making assumptions.

- Yes a more modern server uses less power and has better performance ... but look at the price difference for a modern box compared with it. Even a £150/year price difference equates to many years of usage before you hit the cost of buying a more modern server with equivalent capacity.
- Pulling 150W is hardly guzzling ... I would imagine that there are many gamers on this forum have PCs which pull far more power and are probably on far longer ....
- .... because its not on 24x7 ... I have other systems which are and draw far less power. I have a requirement which means that I need to spin up a large number of VM on temporary basis but actually be able to install the OS on them (otherwise I'd just use AWS).

But you say you are running a R1700 ... I assume you mean you are running a Ryzen processor ... so are you actually running a server or just a glorified PC?
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Assumptions are something we are seemingly both guilty of, for example you don’t know what my R1700 setup cost me and i’d bet it was a lot less than your G7. Also gamers tend to use power when gaming, at idle, a modern PC is highly efficient (intel power gating technology is a thing of beauty) and both AMD and Nvidia have been reducing idle power consumption for years.

Also did you really just suggest a server is defined by its hardware rather than it’s function? Hetzner/Myloc/OneProvider/OVH/WSI all have DC’s packed with glorified PC’s, HP/Dell/Fujitsu Siemens and even apple all have/do sell servers based on consumer grade hardware or a mix of consumer/enterprise class hardware and have done so for a long time, are they all wrong to call them servers?

Either way a G7 is likely approaching 8 years old with up to 70K hrs on it, if you only use it very sparingly, then your logic isn’t bad, thing is most of my lab stuff runs 24/7 as it’s actually used, guess that’s just me and anyone else running actual network services on our glorified PC’s.
 
memyselfandi said:
Depends quite a bit on the server and how you have them configured ... as well as how modern it is which can drastically affect its power efficiency. I picked up a DL380 G7 the other day to do some homelab stuff with and with two 6-core CPUs (L5640, 60W TDP), 32GB and 4x 146GB SAS disks I don't think it bad at all. With the various options set to lower power use, installing a VM, under ESX 6.0u3, it was pulling <150W and the fans didn't go over 13% (which is quieter than the compressor on my fridge freezer at 5m).

Yes older servers were noisier and drunk power like it was going out of fashion but power management and hence heat and hence noise has improved a great deal.
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How much did the server cost you?

For home lab stuff you're far better off investing in Intel NUC's or similar, as they allow you to expand if you ever want to run VSAN, S2D etc (which you really should be wanting to do). They cost peanuts to run, are silent and a 3 node NUC VSAN cluster is very, very quick.
 
Cheap consumer grade bits are fine for lab stuff, can also be a pain in the neck though unless using HEDT parts; e.g limited PCIE lanes, lower memory limits, stuff like that, depends what your doing with your home stuff tbh.

G7 is pretty good for home lab - 384GB memory limit if you've got deep enough pockets - and depending on what software your running you can take a big perofmance hit on a CPU of that vintage (even at same clock and thread counts)

Next addition to my home setup will probably be dual Xeon E5-2*** v2 system as I've got a crap load of registered DDR3 sitting in a box.

Not really worth worry about power tbh unless your going for some serious kit, the example above for the G7 @£170 per year is less than 1 G&T (my favriot form of economic measure) per week at any pub where your not a risk of being stabbed or catching herpes just by touching the bar :D
 
BongoHunter said:
Cheap consumer grade bits are fine for lab stuff, can also be a pain in the neck though unless using HEDT parts; e.g limited PCIE lanes, lower memory limits, stuff like that, depends what your doing with your home stuff tbh.
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A three node NUC VSAN cluster with all flash storage is hard to beat. With the new ones out shortly that's 24 threads, 96 GB of RAM and whatever storage floats your boat. The only downside is that they are not 10GB capable but most people don't 10GB capable switches so that doesn't matter.
 
ChrisD. said:
A three node NUC VSAN cluster with all flash storage is hard to beat. With the new ones out shortly that's 24 threads, 96 GB of RAM and whatever storage floats your boat. The only downside is that they are not 10GB capable but most people don't 10GB capable switches so that doesn't matter.
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Quite expensive though if buying new - you'll be looking at £300+ for 32GB of RAM, £250ish minimum for for a modern basic NUC even with an i3 in it + whatever SATA / M2 drive(s) you go for, and you've got no way of adding additional drives or NIC/HBA/RAID in any meaningful way.

The only thing they really have going for them is low power and space requirements

Would be cheaper and more capable with regular PC parts if space is not an issue
 
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