Building a few servers for work, can I get a little help?

[neighborhoodshortguy]

I've been tasked with building 2 or 3 servers for work. They're going to be used in a data center (granted a pretty small one) and ive been given a few requirements that I have to stick with. First: they must have a dual power supply, Second The disk drives must be in RAID, Third the must be rack mountable. I need either 2 or 3 servers and my budget is ~$9k and building them wont be an issue.

[Lurick]

In this case, I highly suggest you go with something from Dell or HP or another OEM that will offer support, replacements, etc.

[LtStaffel]

1 hour ago, Lurick said:

In this case, I highly suggest you go with something from Dell or HP or another OEM that will offer support, replacements, etc.

This, I highly recommend you get something that's already made and will have support rather than build something.

[HanZie82]

Like @Lurick said, you want an all-in-one package.
Specialy if its misison critical you dont want to figure out how it works to start with.

 

Also do you really need 3 servers? You must be doing some major numbercrunching then. As they are pretty powerfull. And 3 can move mountains.

Ive built 1 for my old office and that did voIP emailserver NAS and some other stuff just on 1 machine. And that was only like 15% taxxed with cheap hardware.
3k per server is a little bit tight tho, depends on your country but here in Europe it will be hard to find a good system for that. Or  I might just live in a very expencive country hehehe.

Best of luck.

[mariushm]

Buy ready made servers servers.

If your budget is tight, another option may be to buy servers from datacenters that match your needs, and then upgrade the cpu and memory and replace the hard drives.

 

See forums like WebHostingTalk for deals on hardware.

 

For example, here's a deal that was recently posted : http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1770933

 

Quote

HP DL360 Gen 9 (4x 3.5" LFF)
2x E5-2637 V3 4 core 3.50GHz
96GB DDR4 (12x 8GB PC4-2133P)
P440AR 2GB FBWC
2x 500W Flex Slot PSU
4x Caddy
HP 331FLR Quad Port NIC
Rails
£930 ex VAT (€1035)
10+ units available

 

These support all Intel® E5-2600v3 Processor Family and Intel® E5-2600v4 Processor Family, there's 24 memory slots (12 used in the example above), you have room to add a 10g card if you want ...

 

You may be able to get a better deal if you negotiate less memory and at this price you could buy an extra or 2 extra servers as spare (shipping will cost you probably a few hundred euro, but seller is in EU)

SATA/SAS hard drives will cost you a few hundred dollars (consider using SATA  SSDs ex Samsung with Pro in name , those use MLC and have higher warranty etc etc)