Server hardware is a ripoff

[lxskllr]

I'm buying a god damn bedsheet and using that, screw this expensive crap.

I can confirm an umbrella doesn't work. I tried that when I was about 7. Didn't work as I imagined; At all... :^D

 

[cubby1223]

So i'm buying a parachute and I was going to get a real one, with real parachute fabric, with real parachute cord , and reall parachute pull strings, and a real parachute backpack and a real pair of shoulder straps, and then I saw the price and it really brought me down to earth.

I'm buying a god damn bedsheet and using that, screw this expensive crap.

A failed parachute means death.

A failed server that can be repaired with replacement hardware within a half hour often is a very minor expense on a small business.

If the business demanded 24/7 up-time else the company goes out of business, then you'd have a valid comparison

 

[cubby1223]

I quite find servers built with the most easily accessible hardware is often the best solution.

I've had a situation once due to flooding where a whole rack of servers needed immediate repair and recovery as soon as humanly possible, the easiest servers to get back up and running quickly were the ones running on simple, common hardware. The difficult and longer ones to get back up & running were the official server-oriented hardware systems.

But again it all depends on the precisely how important up-time is to the particular company, and that varies greatly from one company to the next.

 

[sourceninja]

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[cubby1223]

Gosh, I guess that flood I had to help cleanup was 8 years ago now! Wow how time flies. Lots of improvements have been made in virtualization from then to now.

(honestly, I don't do much server work anymore)

 

[Red Squirrel]

A failed parachute means death.

A failed server that can be repaired with replacement hardware within a half hour often is a very minor expense on a small business.

If the business demanded 24/7 up-time else the company goes out of business, then you'd have a valid comparison

Exactly. And you can fix the potential downtime by having 2 of the custom servers running in some kind of HA or failover mode (depending on what they're for), which will still be cheaper and easier to work on than the enterprise grade one. People seem to have the false sense of security that a "enterprise" server will never go down. It will. After spending a couple hours on the phone trying to explain the problem to some guy in India, you'll finally get a spare part. With a custom built server that uses standard off the shelf components, you could have spares on hand.

The 4 hour response *IS* nice, but imo, it's not really worth the extra cost when you could just use that money to have spare parts or better redundancy instead. Custom built stuff tends to use way less power too, so that's another way to save. Though I think that's changing, lot of the newer enterprise stuff is not as power hungry now days.

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[jlee]

Exactly. And you can fix the potential downtime by having 2 of the custom servers running in some kind of HA or failover mode (depending on what they're for), which will still be cheaper and easier to work on than the enterprise grade one. People seem to have the false sense of security that a "enterprise" server will never go down. It will. After spending a couple hours on the phone trying to explain the problem to some guy in India, you'll finally get a spare part. With a custom built server that uses standard off the shelf components, you could have spares on hand.

The 4 hour response *IS* nice, but imo, it's not really worth the extra cost when you could just use that money to have spare parts or better redundancy instead. Custom built stuff tends to use way less power too, so that's another way to save. Though I think that's changing, lot of the newer enterprise stuff is not as power hungry now days.

What kind of shitty support do you have? HP usually has one on the way in under 30 minutes. Our 3rd party service (SMS) usually takes a three minute phone call and they're planning delivery.

I guess it's a lot different if you only have one server to worry about. We have..a lot more than that.