Cheaper File Server Challenge

[Windows7ge]

8 minutes ago, NZLaurence said:

I think thats the point. What you described there could be done by a good technician, however I would suggest that most small businesses don't have a technician on their permanent payroll. To be able to transplant drives and RAID controllers to a new machine and then import the config is not an 'easy' solution.

To ring a toll free number and then have a tech turn up onsite with a whole spare machine and swap out the faulty part that same day can be very much worth it.

Fair enough for those without the technical know how.

[Blake]

On 5/24/2017 at 4:54 AM, Windows7ge said:

A manager at my uncles business thought paying Dell over $1,000 for a File Server with 1TB of shared storage was a good deal. I proved him wrong after the fact by proposing the building of a latest gen 4 core 8 thread Xeon, 32GB of DDR4 ECC UDIMM memory, and 12TB of redundant storage. Total cost was around $1,400.

 

Here's the challenge. Go to a typical brand server website that sells file servers (Dell, HP, etc) and post here how much cheaper you could build it yourself or how much better you could build it for the same asking price of theirs.

1. You redundant storage isn't. have a mirror doesn't magically make it redundant.

2. You haven't taken into account required IOPS.

3. Support options? are you going to make sure you are there with a replacement 4 hours after a drive dies? what happens if you off on a skiing holiday at the time?

4. "12TB of redundant storage. Total cost was around $1,400." for that price i really doubt is was truly redundant, but if it was....

5. Omitted the use case, of the storage. SQL database versus print server, massively different requirements, one can be safety run of a raspberry pie, where as the other you'll want living on some type of SAN, with multiple SAN's replicating, so you can survive a disk failure, or even a SAN failure. 

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, Blake said:

1. You redundant storage isn't. have a mirror doesn't magically make it redundant.

2. You haven't taken into account required IOPS.

3. Support options? are you going to make sure you are there with a replacement 4 hours after a drive dies? what happens if you off on a skiing holiday at the time?

4. "12TB of redundant storage. Total cost was around $1,400." for that price i really doubt is was truly redundant, but if it was....

5. Omitted the use case, of the storage. SQL database versus print server, massively different requirements, one can be safety run of a raspberry pie, where as the other you'll want living on some type of SAN, with multiple SAN's replicating, so you can survive a disk failure, or even a SAN failure. 

Please reference the rest of the thread before making your counterargument. Thank you.

[grimreeper132]

this is against the file server your boss was gunna get.

a DL580 G4 (off ebay) £70 (possible to get as I did that)

7 5TB Hard Drives (£139 each)

 

£1043 total

 

which has 25TB of storage if set up in RAID 6 or 30TB if set up in RAID 5 which would be hardware RAID as it came with a P400 RAID card

 

OS- one of the free linux one, FreeNAS, Synology something else