Cheap server solution

[Mobby Dick]

Hey guys,

so my friends and I take part in a competition in which we have to work out a start-up company. For our idea (an App that improves the dialogue between a pharmacy and its customers) we need a server to house information on the customers and their former orders (which have to be saved as a photo of the prescription for ~48h and can be deleted afterwards). Pharmacies from all over Germany would have to reach these data (or every pharmacy gets its own server, we don't really know what's best).

Long story short: We need a server!

 

So would you recommend one big server for all pharmacies together or one for each pharmacy? We are leaning towards multiple servers so that the pharmacies would have to rent them and pay extra money ^^ (yes we are evil)

 

And how much would these different servers cost? They don't need to be extremely fast.

 

Thanks for your help  (and you won't help an evil company, since this is just an idea. So don't worry about that )

[KuJoe]

Get a few big servers and virtualize them with ESXI. Create smaller VMs for each pharmacy, for easier management and cheaper overhead costs. Find a data center in Germany that is HIPPA compliant to colocate in for better uptime and security.

Edited April 24, 2017 by KuJoe
Wrong compliance

[Mobby Dick]

4 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Get a few big servers and virtualize them with ESXI. Create smaller VMs for each pharmacy, for easier management and cheaper overhead costs. Find a data center in Germany that is PCI compliant to colocate in for better uptime and security.

Thanks for your help  do you have any idea what that would cost? I am pretty new to servers and stuff ^^

[SCHISCHKA]

For your project it would be easier and more impressive to calculate cloud options like AWS and then compare with hardware costs. You might find cloud has a point in scale where it is more cost effective and least cost effective taking into account the depreciating value of the server and all other costs associated with it

[mariushm]

Not trying to spoil your party... but if you're dealing with patient data, medical records, prescriptions could fit into that, so you may need servers with different security compared to regular servers and so on.. a pain in the ass.

Your system may require DEDICATED servers in PRIVATE racks with encryption and may have to be in an accredited datanceter in Germany (so you don't move the data outside German borders etc) so some cloud systems may not be applicable etc etc

 

And don't get me wrong but when the clerk / pharmacist fulfills a prescription, doesn't he/she have to read the prescription and enter the medicine order in their software and generate an invoice or something for the person paying? You wouldn't need to scan the prescription (and waste time scanning).. your system could slow down transactions for the pharmacy.

Also, some doctor may prescribe something like  "medicine xyz  2 50mg pills 3 times a day OR alternative generic medicine abc 1 x 120mg pill 3 times a day (up to pharmacy and what they have in stock, or whatever patient is not allergic to), so while the prescription has a lot of text, you wouldn't know what exactly the pharmacist gave the patient... you'd actually need the data of what was entered in the order form , to see what they took out from the pharmacy stock , see what user was invoiced for etc

 

 

 

 

[Mobby Dick]

1 minute ago, SCHISCHKA said:

For your project it would be easier and more impressive to calculate cloud options like AWS and then compare with hardware costs. You might find cloud has a point in scale where it is more cost effective and least cost effective taking into account the depreciating value of the server and all other costs associated with it

We thought of that, too, but unfortunately we might run into a problem with privacy when it comes to clouds... We will have to figure that out first. But if it is possible, that might be the best solution.

[KuJoe]

8 minutes ago, Mobby Dick said:

Thanks for your help  do you have any idea what that would cost? I am pretty new to servers and stuff ^^

I would look at blade servers like Cisco UCS B200s, they run about $15k per blade on the higher end but they make excellent ESXI hosts.

 

Sorry for the short answers, on mobile right now.

[Mobby Dick]

5 minutes ago, mariushm said:

And don't get me wrong but when the clerk / pharmacist fulfills a prescription, doesn't he/she have to read the prescription and enter the medicine order in their software and generate an invoice or something for the person paying? You wouldn't need to scan the prescription (and waste time scanning).. your system could slow down transactions for the pharmacy.

Also, some doctor may prescribe something like  "medicine xyz  2 50mg pills 3 times a day OR alternative generic medicine abc 1 x 120mg pill 3 times a day (up to pharmacy and what they have in stock, or whatever patient is not allergic to), so while the prescription has a lot of text, you wouldn't know what exactly the pharmacist gave the patient... you'd actually need the data of what was entered in the order form , to see what they took out from the pharmacy stock , see what user was invoiced for etc

 

In Germany it is already possible for a patient to go to a pharmacy and show them your prescribtion and if the pharmacy doesn't have the required medicine in stock, they order it and deliver it to your house around 4h later (via a transport system by each own pharmacy).

Our idea is to make that first step via an App, so that you wouldn't have to go to the pharmacy to order it. You would scan your prescribtion with your smartphone and the App checks if it is in stock at your local pharmacy (If not it orders the meds). Ether way you will have it delivered in 1-4 hours. The courier of the pharmacy could then bring the invoice with the medicine.

I hope that answered you questions on the idea?

[Mobby Dick]

7 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

I would look at blade servers like Cisco UCS B200s, they run about $15k per blade on the higher end but they make excellent ESXI hosts.

 

Sorry for the short answers, on mobile right now.

Thanks! We have to watch our budget (50k € total, and that includes someone to program the App and so on), but we will definetly consider it  

[Jessasaurus]

I would look at Cloud hosting services like Microsoft Azure to host your infrastructure it lets you expand/Scale the Virtual Machines as needed. and can be a lot cheaper then running/hosting own on prem hardware

[Pixel5]

On 24.4.2017 at 3:15 PM, Mobby Dick said:

In Germany it is already possible for a patient to go to a pharmacy and show them your prescribtion and if the pharmacy doesn't have the required medicine in stock, they order it and deliver it to your house around 4h later (via a transport system by each own pharmacy).

Our idea is to make that first step via an App, so that you wouldn't have to go to the pharmacy to order it. You would scan your prescribtion with your smartphone and the App checks if it is in stock at your local pharmacy (If not it orders the meds). Ether way you will have it delivered in 1-4 hours. The courier of the pharmacy could then bring the invoice with the medicine.

I hope that answered you questions on the idea?

 look at the news, there is a company that just tried to open a pharmacy that would handle the prescriptions via a video chat with an actual pharma dude and the patient could then pick up the medicine at some kind of vending machine.

 

And a court just ordered them to shut down the service after just a few days due to some old laws from before computers even existed.

This stuff is not as easy as it seems, especially you have no experience with servers and even need someone to do the actual programming work this is never going to be a thing.

[pasternt]

For Hardware I could recomemend HP ProLiant Servers, speficially the HP DL360p Gen8. Got one with 2x Intel Xeon E5 2687W v2, 192GB RAM, 8x 480GB Micron Datacenter SSD for ~3.200€. Take 5 of them and you get a enormous Virtualization-Cluster. And a fitting datacenter would be the Equinix, Telecity or Telehouse (all located in Frankfurt am Main). For more Datacenters take datacentermap.com as an example.

 

Kind regards,

 

Tim

 

[Mobby Dick]

On 4/25/2017 at 9:19 PM, Pixel5 said:

 look at the news, there is a company that just tried to open a pharmacy that would handle the prescriptions via a video chat with an actual pharma dude and the patient could then pick up the medicine at some kind of vending machine.

 

And a court just ordered them to shut down the service after just a few days due to some old laws from before computers even existed.

This stuff is not as easy as it seems, especially you have no experience with servers and even need someone to do the actual programming work this is never going to be a thing.

In what country was that? Because the laws differ from country to country.

 

Also we already talked to a programmer and he said it would cost ~30.000€ to programm the apps and the server's programm.

[Mobby Dick]

On 4/25/2017 at 11:53 PM, pasternt said:

For Hardware I could recomemend HP ProLiant Servers, speficially the HP DL360p Gen8. Got one with 2x Intel Xeon E5 2687W v2, 192GB RAM, 8x 480GB Micron Datacenter SSD for ~3.200€. Take 5 of them and you get a enormous Virtualization-Cluster. And a fitting datacenter would be the Equinix, Telecity or Telehouse (all located in Frankfurt am Main). For more Datacenters take datacentermap.com as an example.

 

Kind regards,

 

Tim

 

Thanks for your help but do you really think we would need 5 of them? Wouldn't 1 or 2 be enough at first since for the beginning we expect ~100 people use the system per hour. I am not an expert but that doesn't sound like too much stress for 2 of these server. Also even if it would take a few seconds for the order to be checked and processed, it would still be fine. We will have the money to upgrade further after 2-3 years (if it works :D)

[IT TIM]

(Assuming AWS is not an option, if the German health information privacy laws disallow it)

 

I would HIGHLY suggest that you use 3k-5k of your budget to build a cheap well-rounded rack server (or even $500 desktop) running esxi on some internal drives and establish some performance baselines running as many test-customers that you can fit on it.  The last thing you want to do is blow your 50k on lots of hard drive space and find that what you really need is buku CPU.  You can always repurpose this server sooner or later.

 

Cisco B200s are indeed great and offers lots of easy growth past your first couple blades, and once you get over the first setup it is pretty easy to through in more blades, but you will have no real internal storage capabilities so if you need to store any date you would need a NAS, which with the 10g switches you would need for interconnect, this will quickly eat your initial budget.

 

I would suggest instead getting a second server running esxi once you know what you need for resources of your preferred flavor of server vendor you see yourself going with in the future (I would suggest Cisco, Dell or HP) and growing from there.  You should also get a copy of Veeam and a NAS for backup with your initial budget, get this when you are still in the 'testing your resource needs' stage. Once you have some more money and get to 3-4 rack servers you can start using VMware vSAN, it is a very flexible+expandable hyper converged (compute-ram-storage all-in-one) solution that can carry you into the foreseeable future.

 

Also if you are going to be running Windows server VMs get no less than 8 cores per socket to maximize your enterprise licencing

 

Viel Glück

 

Edit: oops didn't see you only have 20k for hardware ,definitely start with a desktop, you may find that that may actually meet your needs for a while anyway. i5 with maxed out ram and 4 ssd drives maybe in the 500gb range in raid 5 would do the trick since it sounds like you won't have too much need for storage.  Then buy a server with more of whatever your biggest bottleneck is.

Make sure to budget for all the licenses you need before pricing out the server

[Pixel5]

10 hours ago, Mobby Dick said:

In what country was that? Because the laws differ from country to country.

 

Also we already talked to a programmer and he said it would cost ~30.000€ to programm the apps and the server's programm.

Germany