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Just curious, I'm pretty lucky that I get a fair budget but I'm interested in which makes/models of servers you guys would buy if you had the funds to pick what you like.

I'm also interested in why you'd have that make/model and if you don't get to have that now why not - is it JUST budget or is there something else getting in the way? Thanks.

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which architecture / OS are you bound to ? I'd go for AMD on x86, but prefer PowerPC if not bound to x86, e.g. – lImbus May 21 '09 at 9:30
Sorry, this isn't about a recommendation - I'm just genuinely interested in what kit you guys lust after :) – Chopper3 May 21 '09 at 10:22
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12 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

HP ProLiant DL380 G6s (the follow-on to the G5's with the new Xeon 5500-series processors). Better remote management than Dell, and better Windows integration than Sun. Of course, in my ideal world, the consolidated workloads would be running on top of VMware running on the HPs.

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Good call - they're a great machine, SO configurable. Mind you, wait until you see the SLs ;) – Chopper3 May 21 '09 at 16:17
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up vote 8 down vote

The one that will require the least resources over its useful life. Things I look for in my servers include:

  • Redundancy - RAID, redundant power supplies. Redundancy helps reduce downtime, which saves money.

  • Availability - Hot swappable components, can handle a failure gracefully (i.e. keep running). This also helps reduce downtime, and saves money and headaches.

  • Warranty - How fast will my vendor respond if something blows up? Saves me time and money having to keep lots of spare parts around if they will diagnose and repair the system for me.

  • Speed - CPU clock speed, RAM response times, hard drive speed (both RPM and seek/read times), faster is usually better, but not always. Faster processing means less hardware needed for the same job.

  • Efficiency - Fans that only spin as fast as necessary to keep the system cool, etc. Saves electricity and related costs.

  • Expandability - Can I upgrade components (memory, hard drives, etc.) easily? Keeps me from having to constantly replace systems with entirely new ones.

  • Size - Light enough to move around on my own, but not so small that it can't be upgraded or becomes a pain to work on. Allows me to move them around without help, saving my time and opportunity cost for whoever would have had to help me.

Currently we standardize on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 platform because it offers a great mix of the considerations above for our purposes.

Your ideal server will vary depending on what you plan to use it for. Bigger and faster is not always better depending on your use case.

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+1 Good list, and the PE2950 is a good choice imo. I'd rather have lots of those than a few sparcs. – Commander Keen May 21 '09 at 6:07
Can't edit but for Efficiency, the slower spinning fans normally mean a quieter room as well as a cooler room. – Ryaner May 21 '09 at 9:39
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up vote 5 down vote

Sun hardware all the way. Their kit is rock solid, and with unlimited funds you can have an site wide, no questions asked, service contract

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May I please have a fully expanded M9000? I could use 288 expansion slots. :-) – Brian Knoblauch May 21 '09 at 15:23
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up vote 3 down vote

If money wasn't an issue I would run IBM i5. There are just sweet machines that can do some truly AMAZING things.

Specifically I like the hardware level virtual machines, multi-os support, object based OS and security, and IBM Support rocks.

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up vote 3 down vote

I would (and do) run Amazon EC2. The flexibility of 'disposable' servers is unprecedented. Sicne I'm an automation snob, I love the EC2 API, as I can literally program my infrastructure, deploying load balanced web applications with redundant database backends, with storage on Amazon S3 via EBS volumes. Hot sexy hardware is not as relevant as it used to be. While nice, it really is expensive, and as fantasy-land as this question is, it's unrealistic.

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Great answer, thank you. – Chopper3 Jun 1 '09 at 7:59
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up vote 3 down vote

A few thousand of these: enter image description here

running this would be nice.

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up vote 1 down vote

Anything on here should get the job done.

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Thanks for that, I guess I wasn't asking for buying advice as such, more starting a discussion regarding the compromises we sometime make for financial, technical or often political reasons when buying kit. Obviously it would be great to have the build quality of manufacturer A, the performance of B, the flexibility of C, support of D and cost of E but in the real world we have to balance these things and I was interested in these compromises and what people 'dream' of. – Chopper3 May 21 '09 at 9:43
I think his point is that, if you're asking what computer systems most of us lust after, it's the current top supercomputers (if not quantum computers). – Lee B Jan 17 '10 at 18:19
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up vote 1 down vote

Due to lack of funds (I'm an independent contractor rather than a large IT department) I buy a lot of secondhand kit. This tends to fall into two camps: office infrastructure and development platforms for data warehouse systems.

My office infrastructure is pretty basic (just a single server) but I've had good results with HP kit.

I've tried IBM and HP kit for development systems. The IBM servers and workstations were fairly disappointing and caused a lot of trouble. After tearing my hair out with two Z pro 6224s and an X350 that were flaky enough to be unusable (details below) I eventually binned nearly all of the IBM machines and bought HP workstations (XW9300s) instead.

The HPs were robust and trouble-free in a way that the IBMs just weren't. They put up with my ham-fisted maintenance and installation and have much better build quality than the IBM workstations. They are fast, flexible (you can use them as workstations or development servers) and don't cause trouble.

The Intellistation A Pro 6224s I had would not even boot reliably (although I still have a xeon-based Z Pro 6221 that doesn't exhibit these symptoms). The X350 would intermittently boot into its remote management console and getting it to boot to the O/S would take an hour or more of fiddling with the BIOS. This was probably more of a configuration issue than anything else, but I could never track down documentation that explained how to disable it.

Anyway, I moved to the HPs and had vastly better results. Strictly speaking these are not servers, but I have good results with them as a data warehouse development platform. They are somewhat pimped with extra disks and RAID controllers, dual-core CPUs and reasonably large (mostly 8GB) memory configurations. All of the machines were secondhand and doing these upgrades would have been quite expensive from HP, so I got the parts from ebay.

On the whole I can recommend the HP workstations as development machines - they have put up with a fair degree of customisation without reliability issues, they can be used as workstations or development servers and they have been close to trouble free.

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Good post, thank you. I'm lucky, I get to buy whatever HP kit I want (though 90%+ is BL460c/BL490c) and I couldn't be happier but I know the IBM blades are pretty good too. Personally I'll admit to being a bit 'snobby' about Dell but it's nice to hear lots of different views. I can totally see the attraction of 'rolling your own' using SuperMicro etc. I just don't have the time really and the HP stuff 'just works'. Are you actually in Tunbridge? we should have a UK-SF-Meetup :) – Chopper3 May 21 '09 at 10:26
I used to live in Edenbridge, which down the road from Tunbridge Wells (closer to Sevenoaks in practice). Now I live in Petts Wood. 'Concerned of Tunbridge Wells' a running joke about a (possibly aprocryphal) serial writer of letters to the editor in the Times. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells May 21 '09 at 11:11
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Actually I work in London anyway. I dare say that enough SO readers live close to London that some sort of drunken evening could be arranged. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells May 21 '09 at 11:13
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up vote 1 down vote

One of these babies.

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up vote 1 down vote

I'd go for a Dell M1000e Blade Chassis with 8 of the new M710 Full Height blades chock full of 144GB of ram and the Xeon L5520 Processor, and throw in a couple of equalogix SANs with a couple of TB of storage .. say 20 - 30 TB should be good.

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Don't Dell do a half-height blade that lets you have 18 memory sockets ? IBM and HP do. – Chopper3 Jun 1 '09 at 8:00
Nope, their half-height options only have 12x Memory slots. – Zypher♦ Jun 1 '09 at 14:53
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up vote 0 down vote

We tend to build our servers from scratch using SuperMicro mobos. They are stable and reliable and easily customizable. We have full range of servers - from a simple calculators (just a CPU with lots of RAM and 1 HDD) to Virtualization servers including blades and SAN servers. The price is usually lower than the other brands but the quality is on par with them. In a previous company I had good experience with Dell and will love to use them again. Very bad experience with Intel server boards - almost all of the ones we used failed for different reasons.

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If you build your own servers you're responsible for your own hardware support. Not a problem in your case as you presumably have spares in stock, but certainly an issue if it's going to take you 48 hours to get a replacement mobo for a critical server. Dell and HP cost more but will (at a price!) give you a 4 hour support contract. – John Rennie May 21 '09 at 10:38
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up vote 0 down vote

PDP-11... oh wait.

I have always enjoyed using sun hardware, i would probably want Xenon architecture so something like this http://www.sun.com/servers/netra/x4450/ maxed out would be nice.

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