Ever built your own rack mount server?

[Gunslinger08]

My company is looking for 2 new servers to replace some aging P2/P3 servers. Looking at Newegg, it seems that you can save a lot of money by building your own instead of buying Dell/Compaq/etc. Anyone have experience with this?

 

[Vegito]

One of the jr guy that worked for me did.. ide raid.. slow as hell using a 3ware 8port sata card. Save some money, stuff keep crashing, ram parity errors, etc.. dual xeon with corsair ecc ram... needless to say.. he doesn't work for me anymore..

bad idea if its for production..

 

[arcenite]

Originally posted by: joshsquall
My company is looking for 2 new servers to replace some aging P2/P3 servers. Looking at Newegg, it seems that you can save a lot of money by building your own instead of buying Dell/Compaq/etc. Anyone have experience with this?

If you have never done it, don't break the ice with your job on the line.

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: arcenite

Originally posted by: joshsquall
My company is looking for 2 new servers to replace some aging P2/P3 servers. Looking at Newegg, it seems that you can save a lot of money by building your own instead of buying Dell/Compaq/etc. Anyone have experience with this?

If you have never done it, don't break the ice with your job on the line.

Doesn't seem all that complicated. You can buy the barebones systems at Newegg, then just add processors, RAM, and hard drives. Most of them have one PCI slot, so you can add SCSI/SATA raid cards.

 

[Gunslinger08]

Bump.

 

[Lonyo]

Buy brand name.
A server isn't just a PC as such, if you buy Dell/Compaq/whatever you also get the support that comes from them, which is nice if things break.

 

[pukemon]

Originally posted by: joshsquall
My company is looking for 2 new servers to replace some aging P2/P3 servers. Looking at Newegg, it seems that you can save a lot of money by building your own instead of buying Dell/Compaq/etc. Anyone have experience with this?

Like they say "Time is Money." If the machine is for development and you know what and how the machine will be used for, and how many users will be accessing it, and 99.9999999% uptime isn't required, then the BYO may work well - especially for smaller projects/offices. If it is for production use, I still would recommend going with a commercial vendor with 24x7x365 support. My company uses Dell and has 4 hour support for our servers. Contrary to what many people seem to think about Dell (because most deal with Home and Small Business for PC sales), their Enterprise/Government-class support is excellent.

 

[DeathReborn]

Originally posted by: joshsquall
My company is looking for 2 new servers to replace some aging P2/P3 servers. Looking at Newegg, it seems that you can save a lot of money by building your own instead of buying Dell/Compaq/etc. Anyone have experience with this?

I have some experience of this and would only recommend it if you have an in house engineer or the system builder is prepared to be on call 24/7. Generally it's best to buy from IBM, Dell, Compaq etc but then again, if they know what they're doing they can self build quite easily.

 

[Joony]

i've done it for lower end P3s. Not really worth the time and effort for the savings you get.

I'd say for business, go for commercially made Dells or stuff for their service contracts. Getting replacement parts next day is convenient.

Though for personal home rack server, go for it!