News
New Rules
for Cheap Servers
by Stephen Swoyer
July
19, 2004
These days, the entry-level price for a
bare-bones server seems to be about $499 – excluding software,
of course. Tier-one manufacturers such as HP, IBM and Dell all
market systems at this price range – although all three
vendors have been known to go much, much lower.
Earlier this year, for example, Dell Small Business was
blowing out 2.26 GHz Pentium 4-based systems for around $240.
That’s for a PowerEdge 400SC server with all of the standard
fixings. Think that the 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 is old news? Try a
2.4 GHz Pentium 4 – with an 800 MHz FSB – for around $300. Add
after-market accoutrements such as memory (1 GB) and ATA RAID
(controller and extra drive) and you’ve got a dandy little
server for less than $700. But that’s nothing: If you’re not
afraid to go the white box route, and you’re partial to chips
from AMD, you can build a system for even less.
The irony, of course, is that software costs exceed those
of servers – on the low-end, at least. A copy of Microsoft’s
Small Business Server (SBS) typically sells for around $500,
after all, and if you add Exchange or SQL Server to the mix,
you’re talking about several thousands of dollars more.
But what do you get for a sub-$500 server? Just the basics,
ma’am: A not-exactly-cutting-edge – but nevertheless plenty
fast – Pentium 4 or Athlon XP processor; Ultra ATA hard drive
in the 40-80 GB range; memory configuration of between 128 to
256 MB; integrated video card; and 100 or 1,000 Mbps Ethernet.
Add RAID 1 functionality and additional memory, and most
tier-one vendors still come in at just under $1,000 – once
again, excluding software costs.
What can you do with that kind of computing horsepower?
Plenty, says Bryan Lucas, an Exchange administrator with Texas
Christian University who does small business consulting on the
side.
“I've got one environment with a dual-Pentium II 350 MHz
with 384MB RAM running [Active Directory] and Exchange 2000
supporting approximately 85 users,” he comments, adding that
he also supports a dual-Pentium III 500 system running IIS 5.0
and SQL Server 2000 that hosts about 50 websites. “It really
depends on load, [but] you can get buy with far less than what
everyone is pushing nowadays, that is, the Pentium 4s and
such.”
Not surprisingly, small business and small office/home
office environments remain the most ardent consumers of
sub-$1,000 servers. “There’s a big play in small business for
running file-and-print-type activities, and … you can stay
well under $1,000 with half a Gig[abyte] of memory and a
second drive, and that’s good enough for people running
file-and-print,” says Stuart Mcrae, manager of xSeries product
marketing with IBM. “For a small business, if you add in
Microsoft Small Business Server for around $500, this gives
you a server with features that 12 months ago, you had to pay
well over $2,000 to get.”
Mcrae says that sub-$1,000 servers are also popular in some
distributed enterprises – such as branch offices, or retail
stores. “Think of large banks, insurance companies, certainly
retail outlets where they do groceries, shoe chains,
pharmacies -- those businesses have hundreds if not thousands
of stores in a very dispersed environment, and they need a
reliable platform in that store that runs their cash
registers,” he comments.
But what about large, centralized IT organizations? Not
surprisingly, Mcrae and many enterprise users say, sub-$1,000
servers aren’t a common play in such environments. That’s
because the sub-$1,000 server figures a situation – i.e., the
uncontrolled proliferation, ala the fecundity of the
proverbial bunny rabbit, of many standalone servers – from
which IT organizations are struggling to free themselves. Call
it a Malthusian crunch of sorts. “The big trend in large
enterprises that we see is consolidation, whether it’s
physical or virtual consolidation of their distributed server
resources,” Mcrae confirms.
Even if enterprise IT organizations aren’t consolidating,
they typically require more robust data consistency and
reliability features than can be had at the sub-$1,000 price
range. “We certainly sell many, many of our servers for work
group applications, but the type of RAID you get in a $1,000
server is not the same type of performance and reliability
that you get in a $5,000 server, customers know that and
choose accordingly.”
Take TCU’s Lucas, for example, who says that his
organization typically opts for more expensive fare. “We
pretty much only buy Proliant DL380's [at approximately $4500
each,” he confirms.
One big difference between sub-$1,000 servers and their
more expensive brethren is in the area of storage. Most
sub-$1,000 servers use ATA- or Serial-ATA-based (RAID or
non-RAID) storage, while more expensive systems – such as HP’s
ProLiant DL380 servers – exploit SCSI-based RAID storage. The
difference, Lucas insists, is important, in spite of the fact
that Serial ATA has closed part of the performance gap with
SCSI.
“IDE is fine for static, infrequently accessed storage
where there are few users,” he says. “[W]e've purchased five
SnapServers [network attached storage devices marketed by
Quantum] and one of whatever Maxtor called their product. They
all sucked, horrible. Whenever you had more than two people
writing to it at the same time the speed went downhill fast.
Worse, we've suffered a drive failure in all but one of the
SnapServers.”
Adds Lucas: “Now, say all you're doing is a Web server
where most of the files are in the controller’s cache or in
memory, well then an IDE drive is just fine. Add a database
though to the Web site for transactions and you'll see
performance take a hit if there's lots of reads and
writes.”
Ray Zorz, a Windows administrator with UCP Central Arizona,
a non-profit advocacy organization for people with
disabilities, believes that the sub-$1,000 server delivers
compelling value – at least, for small businesses and other
organizations that operate on tight budgets. “Unless you're
needing multi-processor, gigs of memory and a lot of
[redundant hard drives], chances are most of your applications
will run just fine on a sub-$1000 server,” he comments.
Zorz, too, opts for SCSI-based storage where possible. In
this respect, he says, white box server vendors are an
oft-overlooked avenue of opportunity, especially for companies
with in-house IT know-how who don’t mind sacrificing service
contracts. “When we bought our servers, which were definitely
not sub-$1,000, we looked at Dell, Compaq and IBM. A similar
configuration to what we purchased would've been several
thousands of dollars per server more expensive,” he
concludes.
You can contact Stephen about "New Rules for
Cheap Servers" at mailto:?Subject=New
Rules for Cheap Servers.
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