RE: [PRE-ORDERS OPEN NOW] Privex Amsterdam 🇳🇱 is Almost Ready

Dell Servers are great 😍

Though I can't agree that they're "cheap" 🤔 - they're more expensive than HP's with equivalent specs, and there's also generics (Foxconn, Chenbro, Quanta) that can be 1/4 the price of a Dell for the same specs.

But we've learned the hard way... 😡 Generic servers (at least Foxconn) are awful in the long run. They start to randomly fail in different ways after 1 year of buying them, whether the PXE stops working, or the IPMI controller is constantly misbehaving, or the IPMI controller just decides to stop working permanently, or sometimes the whole motherboard will just fail randomly (especially during reboots). Our Foxconns were great when we first got them, but now 3 years down the line we've had about 8/36 (~22%) become defective/fail in different ways, around 4 with broken PXE and/or IPMI, and 4 which seemingly had their whole motherboard fail.

As for HP... They require you to buy a license and renew it every year for each HP server you have - just to manage your server via ILO 🤑 (their equivalent of iDRAC / IPMI) - and they love to make their servers have needlessly proprietary things, such as SAS ports which are shaped/sized oddly to force you to buy expensive HP SmartArray cables.

Dell has lifetime iDRAC (IPMI) licenses, and usually we don't even have to pay for a license ourselves, as a lot of vendors are happy to include an iDRAC Enterprise license pre-loaded on the server when you buy it. 😍

We've yet to have any hardware problems with the R630's we have in Sweden, and the R620's we've got in NL have been working great so far. The only two small complaints I have about Dell servers, is that:

iDRAC 8 (for R630 and other 13th gen servers) can be pretty buggy at times, especially with remote media. I was surprised to find that iDRAC 7 on R620's feels so much faster and loaded remote media without any weirdness.
Dell servers always seem to take a good 2 minutes just to boot past the BIOS/EFI initialisation sequence. Though this also seems to be the case with HP and certain other "enterprise" server brands.

We paid around $3k (plus ~$600 import tax) for 4x Refurb 8-bay Dell R620's with 64GB DDR3 (4x16GB) + SFP+ Quad NIC (2x 10G SFP+ & 2x 1G RJ45) with iDRAC Enterprise License, plus $900 + $180 tax for a 128GB R620. This was a really great deal we got from the vendor though, given most 64GB R620's on eBay cost >$1k each, and often don't even come with iDRAC Enterprise.

Meanwhile Dell R630's are usually $1.5k+ with 64GB DDR4 pre-installed. We were originally planning on buying a half-dozen R630's, but we found that for the same amount of money it'd cost to buy 3x 64GB R630's with dual 4-core/8-thread 1.9ghz CPU, we could buy 5x 64GB R620's with 6-core/12-thread 2.9ghz + 3.5ghz turbo and have money leftover 🤣

~~ @someguy123 - CEO @ Privex

Yeah... I am used to even higher grade than that... of course, way more pricier... but pays on the long run, but needs bigger contracts. HP is not bad, but I can't comment on that right now, since I represent my company that has HPC equipment and also that's totally different from normal business gear.

IBM was OKish... but supper expensive.

I once tried the rogue way with things like ASUS and direct to Supermicro, but I was kind of divided between features and price.

AMD gear is turning out to be a very great thing to go for either way. Especially on the bandwidth arena, both to memory or PCIe.

Server side things... like you mentioned, I think the best if for you guys to go kubernetes or OpenStack in general and live with the consequences of needing a bootstrapping machine to control the provisioned environment. Just like we do on HPC.

Either way, would have a long discussion with a !BEER =)