Server Pricing - Any recent quotes? (Mainly HOSTs - S2D vs SAN etc)

[Steve21]

Good Afternoon All,

 

Just wondering if anyone had any recent quotes for any server/san/s2d combos, and wouldn't mind giving some rough indications for what they got, storage and pricing etc. (Don't need the quote unless you're happy, just rough pricing vs what you got)

 

Obviously need to do some proper quoting, but just trying to piece together a rough costing of a full network server replacement, and haven't had to buy any servers in for a few years as did a full replacement a few years back

 

In an ideal world, any full SSD based hosts with stacks of storage etc but would just be interested to see what pricings like recently, after the whole covid/hdd price issues in the last few years

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[Aprice]

Hi Steve,

 

Just before I took the job at my new school Gaia put in a three host S2D Cluster.

 

Its 3 Dl380 Gen 10s

Dual Xeon 288GB RAM each

Mainly Spinning disks with some 2TB SSDs in each host.

 

The config isn't great and no documentation was passed on, its been a bit of a learning curve moving over from VCentre.

 

Hardware wise its everything I could ask for, with plenty of capacity for growth.

 

I believe it was about £50k all in, that might include some other bits I just don't have any paperwork for any of it.

[Steve21]

That's great, thank you

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[snagrat]

I’ve just put 4x Fujitsu RX2540 M5 in as 2 S2D clusters.

 

Spec is roughly:

Dual Silver 4208

128GB RAM

2x 1TB SSD

4x 7.2k 4TB disks

2x 128GB SSD

iRMC

4x 10GB NICs

 

Total for the 4 was around £25k

[Steve21]

Awesome ty

 

Steve

[dhicks]

In an ideal world, any full SSD based hosts with stacks of storage etc but would just be interested to see what pricings like recently, after the whole covid/hdd price issues in the last few years

 

We recently-ish added a new server as a virtual machine host to host our main critical functionality - Domain Controller, file server, print server, remote access host. This is a Windows Server 2019 host, with hardware certified to work with Storage Spaces - 2 * 1TB NVME SSD caches sitting in front of mechanical harddrives presenting around 24TB of storage space. It holds 96GB of RAM. We also purchased a new QNAP NAS with 70TB of storage to use as local backup storage, with older servers re-used as failover devices. Total cost for the hardware was around £10,000, with installation and configuration being done in-house.

 

More recently, I looked at a remote-access solution with better graphics performance - the remote access host above works quite nicely, and can handle about 30 users at a time okay, but doesn't have the graphics performance of a local machine. Cost for something that could handle 30 users all running a 3D graphics environment or similar was around £60,000, with all configuration and setup included.

[Steve21]

Lovely ty, Out of curiosity are you using 7.2ks behind the cache? Been doing some research into hardware for S2D and seems to suggest 10/15ks are pointless with the caching etc as long as you don't skimp on it

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[snagrat]

I’m using the 7.2k behind the cache.

 

The Fujitsu storage specialists said it was fine and the only benefit of smaller, faster disks would be the speed of any rebuild should a disk fail and need to be replaced.

[Steve21]

Aye that's what most seem to be saying, but was curious as it seems like I understand the principle of it, but just seems if you're having data on the 7.2ks there still is going to be a large hit on read times if people are accessing data that isn't in the cache. Guess the principle is that the unused data isn't often used and thus the cost/trade-off is warranted

 

One more question to add if you don't mind, anyone using switchless config across 3+ hosts? Seems it's been added into the allowed config since I last looked, as previously it was limited to 2 nodes only, but now says any:

 

Switchless: Nodes can be interconnected using direct connections, avoiding using a switch. It is required that every node have a direct connection with every other node of the cluster

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[Tefters]

Go speak with Dell.

 

This summer I just replaced a 6 node, 2 SAN cluster with a 2 node S2D 640 setup on full SSD and it runs like a beast.

 

I had 18TB of data which after staggered VM migration and dedup/compression came down to 8TB.

 

5 year warranty including support and next day on-site mon-fri with remote install for around £38k.

Only reason we took the remote install instead of having some fun and doing it ourselves was that the remote install worked out £50 cheaper than just buying the kit and DIY install.

 

Some pics included for giggles.

Edited September 14, 2020 by Tefters

[dhicks]

Out of curiosity are you using 7.2ks behind the cache?

 

Yes - I haven't done any performance tests yet, but I imagine most of the read / write activity should ht the 1TB cache first. Most of our 7TB or so of "live" data is several years worth of archived images and video, there isn't that much that people actually need to use on a daily basis. Also, we're moving more towards using Google Drive first, with the local storage being used as a backup. Google Drive's performance can be very good - I've noticed it's now faster to upload a large video file to Drive than it is to download it from a camera's SD card in the first place!