@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
I don't have any specs, You might call dell and ask if they have a Whitepaper on the drive.
So, Dell has said the drive is supported for 970 GB writes per day and 2.1 TB read per day. So that covers my needs quite easily. So, at 1.8 TB/day, we are fine. 140GB/drive/day is way less then 970 GB/drive/day.
Looks like raid6 will be fine for us.
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?"A 50/50 r/w load doesn't tell us the amount of writes on average per day. If you read right 1 GB a day on average, it's not going to matter. But if you're writing 5 TB a day, that's another story.
@Dashrender Just had a look at the exact stats from DPACK. Average Daily Write: 1.8 TB. 58% read, 42% write across entire infrastructure. So, with the 800 GB SSD SATA Mix Use drives, would Raid6 be an issue based on 1.8 TB per day write? With that number, how long would I expect a 16 x 800 array in raid 6 to last?
This depends on your drives. But you're talking about 16 drives into 1.8 TB = 125.5 GB per drive/day (really it's more because of the party writes, so it might be more like 140 GB a day) What are the drives rated at for writes? Last time I looked at consumer drives they were north of 1 TB/day for 5+ years, perhaps way north.
@Dashrender The drives would be these: http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1&sku=400-AFLT
Cannot find specs? Any good place to look drive specs up? Google hasn't really shown much.
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?"A 50/50 r/w load doesn't tell us the amount of writes on average per day. If you read right 1 GB a day on average, it's not going to matter. But if you're writing 5 TB a day, that's another story.
@Dashrender Just had a look at the exact stats from DPACK. Average Daily Write: 1.8 TB. 58% read, 42% write across entire infrastructure. So, with the 800 GB SSD SATA Mix Use drives, would Raid6 be an issue based on 1.8 TB per day write? With that number, how long would I expect a 16 x 800 array in raid 6 to last?
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?"
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
Yes, R6 will be far safer than R5 here. If two SSDs died around the same time, your R5 would be dead.
Yes, I get that re r5/r6 and why r6 is safer.
Would raid 6 write penalties be a consern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device. The unit can be opened and then access to the four servers with no additional laptop or equipment needed. IDRAC is great for us for remote management.
Hi Folks,
KMM/KVM, this is in rack management. One of the requirements I gave Dell is to have a 1U fold out monitor with keyboard and pad which can connect to the 4 servers for on site management. (Just fold out the in rack 1U unit. Seen loads of these and been very useful in the past. I have already queried with them why I need both KMM & KVM. Will see what they say. Perhaps they KVM is for the servers to connect to and then the KVM connect to the 1U KMM unit. Will see. Together on the quote these only came to about £1,500. So very small compared to the entire bill. iDRAC is useful for us for remote management. The KMM is in addition for easy on site (no need to carry anything) management.
I am interested in R6 or R5 now. Generally, I've done R5 on smaller SSD arrays but not 16 x 800 GB. I just assumed at that size R5 would be quite risky like if spinning disk, that risk is ok for us on the dev hosts but not stable enough for production - or so I thought. Hence Raid 10. But if raid 5 or 6 are considered solid, then I will rethink that... my question. Lets go based on Raid 6. We still easily hit out IO needs and obviously hit our space requirements:
@MattSpeller Yep, this in R10 will be amazing, but Raid 5/6 will easily perform how we need. The R10 decision was more to help protect customers by putting as much space as possible between potential disk failures and having to bring service down to restore. In reality, R6 with VM replica to other host is looking good and meets our needs.
@scottalanmiller Yes, I fully understand re the price, but as a rough guide as to if its a reasonable quote. I've not purchased a Porsche before. If I were told its going to cost me £700k by a dealer and 'its a great deal'... i'd only know by checking what others paid and online rather than the 'list price'. As said, I have spent most time using them, not buying... so a rough guide that the cost is pretty decent would be helpful 
But understandable if nobody is from the UK/London to say
@DustinB3403 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
OBR5 using SSD's is safe enough, because SSD's don't have the URE risk (among other legacy concerns). Generally, when an SSD fails, it just stops working so the array is degraded. You install a new drive, the system resilvers and you're off to the races.
Decreasing the drive count may be possible, if it will fit your storage needs (by purchasing higher capacity SSDs).
Understood
So for the price, is that an expected cost for the kit or reasonable?
If Raid 5 really is safe enough, i'd really like to drop a few of the SSDs and instead by 10 core or 12 core procs for each host and more on M$ licensing instead.
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
I should also mention that the shear number of drives doesn't really matter here, it's the size of the arrays.
16 x 800 GB = 12,800 TB RAID 0
As this article points out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/07/flash_banishes_the_spectre_of_the_unrecoverable_data_error/, 12 TB on consumer drives have a near 100% chance to hit a URE while rebuilding in parity RAID.
I have forgotten if you consider the parity drives space as part of the space or consider remove it from consideration when looking at UREs.
The article does show that even consumer SSDs have 10x lower URE rates than business class spinning drives, and business class SSDs have 100x lower URE rates than business class spinning drives.
So going by that article, Raid 5 at this size will be fine for us and being raid 6 or 10 is just lost space.
@travisdh1 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 For all new equipment, that seems to be a good price. Trying a different vendor/retailer will probably net you a higher price at this point because of how most OEM handle quotes. No idea if Dell is one of those or not because I haven't bought new in years.
That's what I think, but wanted to check. Rarely get budget here to improve things. We have a budget and the board expect us to spend it all. If not, I don't get it again for a long time. I think its a fair price, but just checking. If somebody said nope, that's 10k too much... i'd go back to Dell asking for more off for example, then with the price dropped, add more hardware 
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
- Two of the T630 will be Raid 10 and will run production workloads (backed up on site and off site)
- Other two T630 will be Raid 5, used for hyper-v replicas from production (replica for some VMs), and used for dev team to run new VMs, to develop on, before moving the release to the production hosts (a cycle). If Raid 5 dies, its all backed up on site and off site, so we will just restore, hence not Raid 10.
You're running SSDs so RAID 5 as a consideration is acceptable in many cases, unlike spinning rust (drives). Considering this, do you really need RAID 10 on the production servers? Could you save some cash by reducing the number of drives and using RAID 5?
Now that said, I don't recall the line where it makes sense to move to RAID 6 on SSDs. You're talking about 16 drives at 800 GB - @scottalanmiller probably knows if you should consider RAID 6 or not.Why do your backup servers have so much more storage than your production? At RAID 5, it's nearly double. Perhaps your change rate is really high, and you want a decent amount of restore points, I'm just asking a question.
Also, do your backup servers need SSD drives for the backup data? I'm not sure the cost savings, but if it's there, perhaps spinning rust would be the way to go?
We were looking at R10 for production to help minimise the chance of drive failures bringing those servers down, should they fail, we have replica VMs of the critical stuff on the second set of raid 5 servers to bring up. Though, if raid 5 is only 1% more likely to fail with SSDs over Raid 10, we would probably go with Raid 5 instead. What are the chances here?
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
- Two of the T630 will be Raid 10 and will run production workloads (backed up on site and off site)
- Other two T630 will be Raid 5, used for hyper-v replicas from production (replica for some VMs), and used for dev team to run new VMs, to develop on, before moving the release to the production hosts (a cycle). If Raid 5 dies, its all backed up on site and off site, so we will just restore, hence not Raid 10.
You're running SSDs so RAID 5 as a consideration is acceptable in many cases, unlike spinning rust (drives). Considering this, do you really need RAID 10 on the production servers? Could you save some cash by reducing the number of drives and using RAID 5?
Now that said, I don't recall the line where it makes sense to move to RAID 6 on SSDs. You're talking about 16 drives at 800 GB - @scottalanmiller probably knows if you should consider RAID 6 or not.Why do your backup servers have so much more storage than your production? At RAID 5, it's nearly double. Perhaps your change rate is really high, and you want a decent amount of restore points, I'm just asking a question.
Also, do your backup servers need SSD drives for the backup data? I'm not sure the cost savings, but if it's there, perhaps spinning rust would be the way to go?
The 2 x 60TB NAS units are used for backups. One on site, one off site. We keep a lot of backups, and these do take up lot of room. I love restore points! Not only are servers backed up daily, we also backup all workstations each night using Veeam Endpoint Free. So, it adds up fast. Real fast.
Hmm, good points. How safe is 16 x 800 GB SSD Raid 5, or Raid 6, over Raid 10?
Raid 10 on the production hosts and backed up.
Raid 5 on the dev hosts (for more space) and backed up. That gives room for the replica VMs we plan to replicate, and room for dev VMs to build the next release before deploy.
Hi folks,
Is £53,574 GBP (pre VAT) a decent price for the following kit from Dell? I'm use to using the kit, not ordering...
The list meets business needs/goals, so not going in to those details, i'm more concerned as to if the price is a good price for the hardware, of if Dell are trying to overprice the quote/rip us off...
2 x Xeon E5-2667 v4 procs (8 core/16 thread)
24 x 32 GB RDIMMs (totals 768 GB RAM per box)
16 x 800 GB SSD using PERC H730P 2GB NV Cache
2 x Broadcom 5719 Quad Port
1 x QLogic 57810 Dual Port 10 GbE
Dual hot plug 1600W PSUs
iDRAC 8 Enterprise
5 Year Pro Support
The going list price online is £100k + for all of this pre VAT, but when has the online price ever been the real price?!
Negotiation with a Dell rep has got me to the above price at top of post... but is that still too high? What would you expect that kit to have been worth really? Windows Server will be licensed separately on these (so not included)...
Just to explain what the plan is with these units:
So, a good price? Excluding Windows Server 2016.
Thanks,
Jim
Some folks are having a bad day. A real bad day.
What firewall do you have? What are the goals? I get all of that through my WatchGuard with Security Subscription.
Can you ask HPE if you can remove the kit list and just pick out your own that totals $60k? If its not useful to you, then what is the point.
I didn't take part in the contest as its US only. Quite often these things are US only. But, I just assumed when I quickly ready the post on SW that you 'had a budget of $60k' to buy what you want from them...
Sucks to be told a list which is useless to you.
After they remove the mark up, I doubt this comes close to $60k anyway. Its probably just an order of kit they had which got cancelled so they gave away...
Pfft. If they don't let you sell it, say you are going with Dell as the free Sh*T is useless to you.
Next renewal we will either get perpetual so we own, or go cloud where the price of the OS is included in the rental.
@JaredBusch said in Microsoft Licensing... Old Agreements...:
@Jimmy9008 said in Microsoft Licensing... Old Agreements...:
@JaredBusch said in Microsoft Licensing... Old Agreements...:
@Jimmy9008 said in Microsoft Licensing... Old Agreements...:
Check the link out towards the bottom:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1915586-licensing-againYou provided different information there (did not follow the SW links before).
Yes, Open Value Subscription is different than a standard Open Value Agreement.
Apologies
I admit, that based on your OP, I just assumed a standard OV agreement. OVS is super rare in the SMB.
Just fixing things here. Not really tackled licenses before. Previous lot of people didn't really take care of licenses and just let the supplier gget whatever...