Cannot decide between 1U servers for growing company

scottalanmiller

What other storage devices? FreeNAS with ZFS.. Hell no (in my head)

Never...

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2014/05/the-cult-of-zfs/

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/07/the-jurassic-park-effect/

ntoxicator

So you suggest the HC Scale products them as direct replacement model as to what I currently have going on? Skip the 1U/2U servers and NAS storage?

scottalanmiller

@ntoxicator said:

@scottalanmiller

So you suggest the HC Scale products them as direct replacement model as to what I currently have going on? Skip the 1U/2U servers and NAS storage?

I would highly suggest them as a starting point and having a discussion with them. They look to be a great fit for your needs. Not the only one, but very well suited in this case.

Disclosure: My tag gives away that I work for a service provider. That's @ntg and we are a partner with Scale. So I might be biased towards them a bit Always a risk with advice. But we work with tons of providers too and use several internally ourselves. These days XenServer, Scale and Hyper-V tend to be the most common "go to" platforms in the SMB. For your needs, Scale seems like an excellent fit. You are big enough and your "scale" needs over time make their "node" growth model very good for you.

scottalanmiller

@ntoxicator said:

So essentially, likes to make end-game decisions. Which cripples everything.

I've been looking for other IT Job Opportunities

When you have a company that is like that, often there is little else to be done. Doesn't mean to jump ship recklessly, but it does mean that staying long term probably isn't the best career move.

Minion Queen

NTG is a Scale partner so if you have any questions we would be happy to answer them for you.

BRRABill

And the OWA doesn't store any personal files/cookies/data on the machine?

Or do you always use incognito?

ntoxicator

If I can get all our employee's to switch to OWA, this would be big savings in network storage (due to OST file growth). Also cost on Office subscription / purchase price as OWA is already there at no added cost.

BRRABill

@Dashrender said:

Talking about local storage - using OWA also means not OST/PST files - no less thing to worry about encrypting your drive over.

See the post riiiiiiight below yours.

scottalanmiller

@ntoxicator said:

If I can get all our employee's to switch to OWA, this would be big savings in network storage (due to OST file growth). Also cost on Office subscription / purchase price as OWA is already there at no added cost.

Yes, in theory you could show big financial advantages (both up front and for forever) and additionally show improvements on the technical side with the network improvements, people being able to work more easily, investing in the future rather than in technical debt, etc.

JaredBusch

I have not used any Scale hardware yet, but that is only because I do not have a client where it is the right fit. I have worked with temp hardware and I love the gear.

I agree with @scottalanmiller that Scale should be the first thing you look into. Certainly not your only option, but I think it is a very good one.

Note: I have the Service Provider tag as I work for @Bundy-Associates and we are an IT consulting firm. We are not partnered with any vendor and I have no incentive for any pf my opinions.

Minion Queen

And to be clear NTG partners with Scale and many other Vendors, so that we can offer the most and best (dependent on client what is best for each one) solutions for clients to choose from.

scottalanmiller

@Minion-Queen said:

And to be clear NTG partners with Scale and many other Vendors, so that we can offer the most and best (dependent on client what is best for each one) solutions for clients to choose from.

Yes, we work quite hard to remain neutral. And an important part of that is disclosures

ntoxicator

Server quotes came back

LENOVO Server X are decently priced per 1U
ThinKServers are cheapest

Still waiting on pricing from CISCO

Oracle dropped price down... nearly 8k for an 1U server. But they have only minimal 600GB SAS drives?? wtf

Like to have NEW server prices and present them to CEO/Finance and then also look at used servers. I really like what xBYTE has for inventory

brianlittlejohn

@ntoxicator The next server I buy will be from Xbyte... Unless I go Scale.

Aconboy

@ntoxicator pricing seems to be relatively ok with 3250M5's, my concern is they seem a bit dated on specs vs others. The BIOS on them is a bit of a huge PITA in my opinion. Are you still thinking of rolling your own or is a prebuilt solution still on the radar for you?

ntoxicator

I could easily build our own again using Supermicro hardware. its trusty. only downside is warranty and such

But I suppose, if running in HA 2-3 servers within XenServer.. would be a non issue if one had a hardware issue.

Aconboy

@ntoxicator agreed on supermicro - good gear, but the company is built to work with vendors, not so much end users. On the Scale side, we don't use Xen - too much overhead on the l3->l1 calls. We use KVM at the base, then made it cluster aware

ntoxicator

And here i was getting blasted about ProxMox and KVM... I personally feel KVM is superior

Just XenServer uses XEN hypervisor and packages their own features etc. dont know all details, just 10k foot view.

Aconboy

@ntoxicator I can go over what we do with you - no strings attached. I have a web demo that I do weekly on thursdays at 1:30 central time. http://bit.ly/HC3LiveDemo if you want to come. As far as KVM goes, being that it is a pair of kernel modules, it allows us to do tons of stuff that we otherwise couldn't

ntoxicator

I'll see if i can join. have another meeting at 2PM EST. if I'm available i'll hop on