Hey

In about 1-2 months we are launching a directory.

I have a few questions or some feedback on some hardware expierences.

We are buying 2 of these types of servers

Dual 1ghz
3gb of RAM
4x36gb 10-15k SCSI drives

We are looking at 2u machines, but just wondering expierences with these companies

qsol
online-spectrum
dell

We are seriously looking at this one from online-spectrum

http://www.online-spectrum.com/rack_sys/r285form.htm

And then beefing it up...

ALso any other companies. We need 2 of them so we are just looking for a little help...

Joe

In my past experiences, you can't go wrong with Dell. They are on the expensive side, but their systems are solid, with good phone support for businesses (as far as I've encountered). Their home consumer lines, however, require you to go bake a cake while on hold...

Their overnight parts delivery is also nice. The 4-hour one is even better. :)

I haven't ordered any through online-spectrum yet, but I've heard good things about them and their prices are attractive.

Online sprectrum is looking the best right now

I mean dell is just alot over.

Since we need 2 of them for multiple datacenters, we can almost get 3 online spectrum servers for the price of 2 dells

We are still looking at all options

Thanks for the feedback

Joe

We've switched to Dells exclusively, and I can't say enough about the build quality of their machines.

I would want to know what's on the motherboard of that other server before comparing with Dell prices. The PowerEdge 2550 (what you'd probably be looking at) uses the ServerWorks chipset, and is a real screamer. It has three PCI buses, 64-bit PCI slots, and interleaved memory. I had my reservations about the onboard RAID controller at first, being a Mylex fan, but it's worked very well in practice. Having 128MB of cache is a real performance boost.

The 2550s can be had relatively affordably. The real trick is not to buy the system memory from Dell; their prices are obscene. Just order it from them with the minimum memory config and then get some 512MB Registered PC133 DIMMs from Crucial.

[Edited to point out one more thing]

The Adaptec card spec'd on that other server is a single-channel card. You definitely want a dual-channel card if you're using four drives. Also, make sure the hot-swap bays are on split backplanes.

We use Dells. They can be expensive like said before, but we have had 0 problems... so I wouldn't be able to tell you how their support is :D

We have recently starting using qsol.com servers and the quality seems real good, especially for the price. They have some great deals and we've had 0 problems with them since we started using them a month or two ago.

-Brendan

Qsol vs online spectrum, is there a difference

Joe