Niotex wrote:I've stated this before, it's not hard to spec and price out a server. You can literally go to a website right now, add components to your cart and see how much it would cost including warranty. Additionally you can see how much rack space would cost, they have prices listed for this purpose. Telling the community what they're paying for and why that specific setup goes a long way.
And as asked before and promptly ignored, which is what Xophilarus could reffer to.
Niotex wrote:If you're wanting to do this and take the redesign on, I think it's only fair to be completely transparent. On both the hardware and the software platform side of things, as even a new low end server would be a huge leap in system resources. In short, what are you planning that would warrant a relatively speaking high end rack?
I am always open to suggestions on what people think should be done. Longevity is currently the goal with a physical server. We shouldn't buy for the now; we should buy for the future. I'd like to get something that we can put in place and not have to touch for many, many years no matter what we do with it. We have done this before (2009) and now doing it again now at half the cost seems extremely reasonable to me. I looked at several sites for servers including getting servers through business discounts at Dell and HP. Derobert suggested this server since he has purchased from there before and had a really good experience:
http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i57631/ ... server.php
If you would like to help coordinate server alternatives, I will really appreciate the help! One idea that has been tossed around is cloud-based servers and hosting. I know they are getting popular, but I am not familiar with how to plan for a cloud-based setup for the functions we need: web server, database server, search database server, video streaming server, bulk storage server. How much does that cost? How do we have a steady budget with no overages? How do we make sure the cloud host doesn't go poof? The last thing I want to happen is move to a cloud environment and then suddenly costs spike due to useage and we're skrewed or we have to get rid of site functionality because now we're paying for compute cycles instead of just plain power and bandwidth.
I've always liked the "you get this physical space, power, unlimited bandwidth," which is what we use now. We'll probably stick with this plan unless something solidly better comes along (I'm always up for something solidly better
).