But the REALLY infuriating part of building your own boxes is component availability; namely mobos and chassis. We built a small fleet of sweet 1U RAID 0/1 hot-swap servers and Ghosted appropriate images for various configs. Cost: $600/ea. It's terrific. Being that every server shares the same chipset and hot-swap architecture, we can launch, repair and repurpose servers almost instantly and without a screwdriver. But, now, we need more units and the parts are nowhere to be found. Intel discontinued the mobo after only two years. Hence, the chassis vendor stopped making our chassis. We have no choice but to start another tandem fleet (this will be our fourth), maintain yet another cache of replacement parts, build a new library of Ghost images from scratch, etc., etc. Sure we could've purchased twice as many components to start, but my small hosting company simply doesn't have that kind of budget (or we wouldn't be building our own servers to begin with).
I know. "Boo hoo..."
FWIW.
Dave
ps. See my "Want It Now" auctions on eBay.... ;-)
Len Conrad wrote:
Where do you buy your cases, motherboards and such?
You don't have to build your own, there no's advantage. OK for hobbyists. You have to select multiple components, place multiple orders, pay multiple shipping charges, pay multiple invoices, track multiple component warranties, etc.
Lots of on-line PC products sellers have a wide rage of rackmount servers. eg, tigerdirect has their "vision" line of rackmount servers. I'm not recommending them, only an example. Then their is the whole industry of, usually Taiwan-linked, importers/integrators that will build whatever you want. It's a all generic stuff, so no need for maintenance contract. I haven't used or recommended name brand stuff for many years. I had my own horror story with a leased Dell and 4-hour/3-year maintenance contracts that resulted in Dell phone jockeys telling the hosting service monkey to remove a disk that broke/destroyed the RAID5. Never again.
Do you try to keep a standard config as hardware goes of do you keep extras on hand?
Hardware is so cheap, and messing with individual components is so expensive, that full box backup, using the same box for many specific roles, is the best way to go. cookie-cutter boxes
Len
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