- Jun 2, 2009
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What do you guys think about using a Haswell NUC/Brix for WinServer 2008/2012? Duties would be Active Directory accounts for ~20 people and Quickbooks Enterprise 2013, primarily. No web duties or other CPU heavy stuff.
Currently we've got a server with Xeon 3430 with 4G RAM, 40G boot drive, and 2x500G HDs in RAID1. It eats a bit over 200W idle and generally the most intense things it does are serve Quickbooks and hold about 200G of total office files. Everything's backed up on Carbonite.
If we go with the NUC, the CPU should at least be competitive with such an old Xeon, and a single 500G SSD should be much more reliable than old HDs in RAID (and we've got Carbonite anyway). Power usage would drop over 90% (and we're out in the sticks so power's on the expensive side), performance and reliability would both improve significantly with the SSD, and we could sell the old server for I'd imagine at least 500 - enough to recover most of our initial investment right off the bat.
What do you guys think? We'd lose ECC memory and a few other niceties, but for a mission like this I'm not convinced it'd matter anyway. And with wins in power bill, performance, and reliability (minus the ECC issue) it sounds like a win to me. We'd get three years of warranty too... I'm sure the current server warranty is long expired.
Currently we've got a server with Xeon 3430 with 4G RAM, 40G boot drive, and 2x500G HDs in RAID1. It eats a bit over 200W idle and generally the most intense things it does are serve Quickbooks and hold about 200G of total office files. Everything's backed up on Carbonite.
If we go with the NUC, the CPU should at least be competitive with such an old Xeon, and a single 500G SSD should be much more reliable than old HDs in RAID (and we've got Carbonite anyway). Power usage would drop over 90% (and we're out in the sticks so power's on the expensive side), performance and reliability would both improve significantly with the SSD, and we could sell the old server for I'd imagine at least 500 - enough to recover most of our initial investment right off the bat.
What do you guys think? We'd lose ECC memory and a few other niceties, but for a mission like this I'm not convinced it'd matter anyway. And with wins in power bill, performance, and reliability (minus the ECC issue) it sounds like a win to me. We'd get three years of warranty too... I'm sure the current server warranty is long expired.