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Ask HN: Used Dell Poweredge C6100 servers + colo or AWS?

1 points by manishsharan ↗ HN
I am a solo bootstrapper and I am trying to figure out whether I should get 4 x c6100 servers ( 2 x Intel Xeon L5639 + 96GB per + 250gb SSD - per node , 4 nodes per server) for about US$7k +approximately $4k for annual colo charges or scale up using AWS. The Dell servers are from ebay and their longevity/reliability is questionable. I will also be using a managed hub ( still deciding brand -- but will buy used from ebay) I plan to buy four of those for redundancy. The colo would be within driving distance of my home.

My environment has Mongo , Redis, NGINX , beanstalkd and glassfish app servers and I expect to do a lot of video transcoding using FFMpeg ( If I manage to get traction). With dell c6100, I am getting a lot of CPU cores and memory and SSD that I could never afford on AWS. I probably don't need this kind of capacity in the first few months of my launch but I am hopeful that my business would grow.

Could HNers with more wisdom and experience in these decisions please share their experience with this decision. Also feel free to critique this idea. Thanks!

8 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 25.3 ms ] thread
benologist
I would suggest you look at just leasing an ordinary dedicated through these guys, who I used for ~3 years.

https://hivelocity.net/dedicated-servers/intel-xeon-lynnfiel...

Dual e5 2620 + 96gb ram + 480gb ssd for $493/month, and in 6 to 12 months you'll be able to shift to a bigger server at a lower price.

Benefits are:

- the physical server and network are always their problem

- you don't have to slap $7k down now

manishsharan
I will book mark this. However, the problem I see with something like this is redundancy -- I would need atleast 2 servers and that would add up to USD 12k per annum.
benologist
Yeah redundancy is going to be expensive. Was your $7k+4k per server or was that for a pair?

It wouldn't hurt to use AWS as a backup though - if you're unexpectedly offline for 24 hours just fire up a big server that is affordable for a short burst.

manishsharan
Each Dell Peoweredge c6100 is around USD$ 1500 -- each server contains 4 nodes . Each node is a dual CPU server with its own RAID ,network port and IPMI port.I think only the power supply is shared with all 4 nodes. have 2 or 3 of these kind of gives a lot of redundancy. The CPU is kinda dated and slow though.
benologist
I think I would try just one plus AWS-for-emergencies first.

Or possibly http://zencoder.com/en/ until the expense justifies investing in your own hardware.

mtrimpe
I bought a similar setup for a similar purpose a long time ago and unless you want to offer custom ffmpeg encoding beyond what Zencoder / AWS / TransloadIt offer my advice would be to use them instead.

If you really want to; I still have a 4x 3GHz Xeon server with 48Gb of memory and 8 450Gb 3k-RPM SAS drives in RAID-6 running in a colo. You're more than welcome to take it off my hands. I don't think it's load ever got above a few % :)

manishsharan
Awesome I would love to take this off your hands. Could I email you later on at your email address in HN profile ?