Scott Ehrlich wrote:

I've priced some 1 and 2U Dell servers. Now, I'd like to perform a price comparison of COTS hardware for 1 and 2U servers. What VAR companies do people recommend I check out for putting machines together? I'm perfectly capable of installing and swapping hardware components when/where needed, so on-sight support is not needed.

I've bought a few hundred systems from ASA computers www.asacomputers.com

They are alright. I've heard lots of good things about Silicon Mechanics www.siliconmechanics.com. I think I'll be buying a system or two from them soon, mainly since they are local and I do want on-site support, don't want to troubleshoot and replace stuff myself.

Both specialize in Supermicro systems.

nate

On Feb 4, 2008 10:38 PM, Scott Ehrlich scott@mit.edu wrote:

I've priced some 1 and 2U Dell servers. Now, I'd like to perform a price comparison of COTS hardware for 1 and 2U servers. What VAR companies do people recommend I check out for putting machines together? I'm perfectly capable of installing and swapping hardware components when/where needed, so on-sight support is not needed.

I am not sure what type of cluster you are going to be doing HA or HPC but I just wanted to make sure that if you are looking at it for HPC that you saw the dell sc1435. When we were pricing 1U cluster nodes recently they gave the best bang for the buck. We were looking for raw CPU power and lots of ram and were not worries about the server grade stuff like raid, redundant power supplies, or remote administration like iLO or DRAC. When we compared prices with the other major companies as well as a number of linux cluster providers and a few whitebox builders they came in cheaper. In addition the next business day replacement parts are pretty nice.

So far we have been happy with them.

Rob