Buying old server hardware to keep costs down.

[LukeC]

Hi guys how are you all. Happy New Year for whenever it reaches you.

I am currently researching building myself a nas to suit my purposes and budget and I've run into a question I can't seem to find an obvious answer via the stickies and previous posts. I'm sure it has been asked so I appologised if I missed the answer obviously somewhere.

In a nutshell, I will be using the nas to store backups of my work (I am a freelance 3d artist), store the usual documents and photos and stream movies to raspbmc. It will not have heavy use but I do want it to keep my data safe.
Basically I am trying to see if it is viable to buy older server hardware to keep costs down but here are the questions I'm a little stuck on.

1. I am considering an older xeon, although I am unsure how old I should go. Currently I have no real need to do any transcoding, although I might in the future.

2. Is older hardware more power hungry? I assume it would be, but as this build is only really to last 2 years max, I think I can tolerate it being a little more power hungry then current generation hardware.

As I said I am still researching, so forgive me if it appears like I am asking you to do my work for me. I just find that I get a little lost looking into old hardware and I am running around in circles, so if I can get past the new/old hardware hurdle that would greatly help in spending my research time a little more wisely.

Cheers in advance and all the best
Luke

 

[jgreco]

Older hardware works but may be slower and will eat more power compared to similar speed modern gear.

For example, we have some nice Tyan S2882 with Opteron 240EE storage servers, loaded with 4 disks they run around 90-120 watts. The EE is the 30 watt very pricey variant of the CPU. That was great at the time (2005 era) because most similar gear was 150-300 watts.

But these days, some of the guys here have been building similar systems that idle around 30 or 40 watts.

So, points:

1) Cheap older servers are unlikely to be energy efficient

2) If you look at the cost differential between 50 and 150 watts, at 11c per kWh, for two years, that is 1752 more kWh or about $200 in power.

So be sure to consider that the server will have a hidden $200 cost (at least for the example I gave).

 

[LukeC]

Hey thanks for the response.

You've highlighted to me the importance of power consumption a little more then I had considered. As my cost per kWh is roughly double yours (about 24c) here in the UK, there is a far higher added cost then I had realised.

Cheers for that, it has helped a lot.

Luke

 

[jgreco]

Also you may find you love having your storage as NAS, and even if your original purpose for a NAS goes away in two years, you will probably find a use for it. In that case the lifetime may be much longer than you expect.

I find pragmatic analysis of capex vs opex to be very enlightening.

 

[LukeC]

You have a valid point. Its hard to look beyond the false economy of a cheap outlay and easy to forget ongoing expenditure caused by poor choices now. More importantly, its hard parting with my hard earned cash which is hard to come by as a freelancer haha.

But truth be told, if the NAS is as useful as I believe it will be, I will be storing years of hand made texture and model libraries that I can simply not afford to loose so I guess if I'm going to do it, I might as well do it properly.

 

[jgreco]

Happy to help. Some of us have spent TOO MUCH time considering all the angles...

 

[gzartman]

Hi guys how are you all. Happy New Year for whenever it reaches you.

I am currently researching building myself a nas to suit my purposes and budget and I've run into a question I can't seem to find an obvious answer via the stickies and previous posts. I'm sure it has been asked so I appologised if I missed the answer obviously somewhere.

In a nutshell, I will be using the nas to store backups of my work (I am a freelance 3d artist), store the usual documents and photos and stream movies to raspbmc. It will not have heavy use but I do want it to keep my data safe.
Basically I am trying to see if it is viable to buy older server hardware to keep costs down but here are the questions I'm a little stuck on.

IMO, this is a great way to go. You can get some incredible deals on very good enterprise grade hardware from folks who just upgrade their hardware alot. The boxes might be 3-4 years old and have all the bells and whistles you'd pay thousands of dollars for in new hardware:

- Server grade motherboard with KVM via IPMI;
- ECC DRAM;
- Fairly mainstream Xeon processors (5500 & 5600 series);
- Enterprise grade chassis;
- Many years of good life still left in the box.

The list goes on, but you get the point.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, um, there's a reason people are discarding Westmere and they're available cheap. They burn a good number more watts. But if you can afford the watts, then, yes. Basically large scale data centers are retiring Westmeres at a clip that's high enough to keep prices pretty low. I've been keeping an eye on some PowerEdge C6100's for possible use as virtualization hosts. Keep 'em powered off unless there's sufficient demand... cheap way to do that.

 

[gzartman]

Yeah, um, there's a reason people are discarding Westmere and they're available cheap. They burn a good number more watts. But if you can afford the watts, then, yes. Basically large scale data centers are retiring Westmeres at a clip that's high enough to keep prices pretty low. I've been keeping an eye on some PowerEdge C6100's for possible use as virtualization hosts. Keep 'em powered off unless there's sufficient demand... cheap way to do that.

They aren't discarding them because of power.

 

[jgreco]

Fascinating. By all means, do enlighten us then as to the motivation.

 

[cyberjock]

Exactly what ^^^ said.

Do enlighten us, because the one person I talk to from my last job is discarding Westmere servers(by CPU model and nothing else) because of idle power usage.

 

[jgreco]

I mean, don't get me wrong ... they're pretty good hardware. But if you are going to run it 24/7 the costs are a good bit higher than Ivy E5. And quite frankly Ivy E5 eats lots more power than Haswell E3. The E5 box we've got here has never gone too far south of 200 watts IIRC even when it only had an E5-2609.

 

[gzartman]

LOL. Seriously???

Oh I don't know. Maybe Intel comes out with a new IMS box that greatly simplifies management of a rack of 1U 3 year old servers. Or Intel releases a new processor that allows for more VMs on a single box thereby reducing management costs or any of a dozen or more technical related reasons.

If you are worried about power can consumption, go by an ATOM box from synology or netgear.

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[cyberjock]

Riiight. Totally buying those excuses. Not!

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[survive]

Hi guys,

I would think most of this gear is coming off lease.

-Will

 

[cyberjock]

I know the c6100s are going up in price. Looking for a replacement now. :(


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[gzartman]

You guys go ahead and leave all that great gear for guys like me. I'll take it.

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