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Refurbished servers - worth it?
In the need for a few more dedicated servers and noticed there are some really nice offers available on eBay for refurbished servers. So my idea was to cut the running costs a bit and instead pay the costs upfront to get a refurbished dedicated server and put them in co-location.
From what I read the power is the issue and what makes the costs higher, but it seems it can still be worth it or am I missing something?
Looking at Dell R610 with dual L5640, 48GB RAM and a Perc H700 controller. I'll purchase new disks just to be sure. Would it be suitable for a general web server or would I feel the pain of older hardware?
Anyone have good/bad experience with refurbished servers?
Comments
Almost everything depends on your power/colo costs and the reliability you require.
Price for co-location will be around 100-120 Euros for two of these servers.
we work with L5640 on IBM Blade HS22 ( 14 servers in 7U -central management) and Supermicro 4 Node ( 4 servers in 2U )- both are high density so cut the cost for colo and power.
About "refurbished servers" - most of them are ok , you have some risk with shipping ( if you buy on ebay ) but if you buy from big resellers the risk are minimal.
You need to think about this operationally.
For example, can your servers be allowed to be down for several days? If not, you’ll need to have spares on site (if your provider can indeed store them for you).
Yes, as far as operational it will be OK. More concerned about the performance, i.e. am I comparing specs that's no way related to each other.
As an example: OVH has Xeon D-1520 (single CPU) for about the same running cost as one of these servers. Would they be comparable or would one be the clear winner?
1xXeon D-1520 (Single CPU), 64GB DDR4, softraid
2xL5640 (Dual CPU), 96GB DDR3, H700 hardware raid
I don't think it's worth the hassle. But the 2xL5640 should do better than this Atom branded as Xeon.
If you wan't to use dual L5640 and use two disks with about 10 watts each, you would be at 140 watts (60 watts for each CPU) for these 4 components.
I'm assuming, we have a month with 30 days and we are using max power with power costs from German colocation provider myLoc at 28 eur cents per kwh.
Only these four parts would give me power costs of 28,22€ ($33,34) per month, not including a ODD / motherboard / psu and not including the costs for the 1 or 2u space itself.
On the other side I found a offer from qps (from Aug 2016) which offers dual L5640, including 2x2TB hdd for $49.
Please keep in mind: You will have to** buy spare parts** (as HDD, PSU...) and you will have to pay a technican to replace that part. You should keep these costs in mind too.
You can calculate your costs very easily with the $ per kwh and the rack space itself.
In Germany colocation is just too expensive, but I don't know the kwh prices in the US.
It depends what you're after - if you need single thread performance, then D-1520 will mostly likely perform better, if you're after high parallelism, then sure - go for the old piece of silicon.
Also DDR3 vs DDR4 memory.
You have to look at what the purpose of the server is, before you can say if one config would be better than another config.
100% agree, but OP says nothing about the purpose so I generalised. I am myself after a D-1520 for home use and I am sure it will fit my needs.
Xeon-D is using Broadwell-core, that is 14nm Haswell architecture. The same, as Xeon E3-v4 and E5-v4 (or desktop i3/i5/i7). Xeon-D can hardly by considered as re-branded Atom as there is no Atom based on Broadwell/Haswell.
Concerning L5640, I'm not sure how it compares to Xeon-D (performance-wise). It is much older Westmere/Nehalem architecture. And even if it is low-power version, I think Xeon-D offers better performance/power ratio...
Yes, but don't forget you have a 12MB cache per L5640, and OP is asking about a setup with two of these, where the D-1520 has 6MB. This pretty much makes the Xeon-D an Atom for something more like professional use in my eyes, but since I currently can't benchmark them against each other my opinion is only that - an opinion.
So that pretty much also makes E3-1225 an Atom CPU?
What did you smoke this morning?
Judging by this D-1520 and L5640 actually have very similar performance. So IMO 2*L5640 will definitely better than single D-1520 in terms of performance, especially with added RAM.
Power consumption, reliability, etc, are another matter though.
You sure you know that you are comparing a ~2011 CPU to a ~2015 CPU, and then with something build in ~2010 that will most probably outperform them in 2017?
1225 was not an Atom, but it damn feels like one in 2017.
But this has nothing to do with the topic, so not sure what your point is? The Xeon-D is faster?
My point: You judge a CPU's architecture based on the amount of CPU cache - that's just being silly.
Aside from operational concerns, hardware that old is generally a waste of money in a colo environment - it uses much more power than a similarly powerful new server and something in there is going to break much sooner, which will require you to spend more on a replacement and remote hands.
If it's 1-2 servers then I would rent it from a company that can benefit from economies of scale.
"It uses more power" is the same fucking excuse greenies use for buying new cars. If it doesn't affect your bottom line, you're saving money by keeping the old fuckers running. See also: WSI/nocix.
We use 95% servers of this generation as they are cheap. A dual socket HP enterprise server (DL360, DL380) can be had for less than 150$ in EU or 100$ in US.
Absolutely not. The IPC from socket 1366 to 2011 did not INSANELY change. It definitely does NOT justify 500% more cost (at the very least).
Sure. At way worse performance:price ratio.
I buy X5650 at 20$, 2 of them outperform any Xeon-D of any generation which cost x10 or more at barely 2.5x power usage.
What bs. A DL360 G6 is using the same PSUs as the newest gen and a lot of parts are exchangeable, HP provides them still as well and ebay is full of them.
Realistically if you need a spare shipped for a DL360 G6 vs. a DL360 Gen9 you will wait the same time, but pay more for the Gen9 part.
Where DDR3 ECC is WAY cheaper, i pay less than 10EUR per 8GB DIMM used from Israel. How much is the cheapest used or new DDR4 ECC 8GB DIMM?
@William is not the cheap bastard we wanted to hear from, but he's the cheap bastard we deserve.
Pretty simple, yea, because NOTHING beats this prices, especially in EU:
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/bargain-hardware-store/Rackmount-Servers-/_i.html?_fsub=22279186010&_sid=121231090&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322
Further we buy E5 v1 (v2) now as well as they get cheaper to the levels 1366 had before, while 1366 dropped well below 100$ at times.
Point in case - i bought 2 DL360 in LA shipped mainland US for less than 120$.... add 2 CPUs each (50$), 128GB RAM (160$), 4x1TB HDD (~300$) and you have a damn nice VPS node for less than 600$.
Fuck those are nice prices. I may have to re-consider my 90s dream of a rackmount server closet in the house (after I move).
Reminds me of the time where they had those DL160 G6 chassis for 40 pounds each in stock ... well now they're sold out.
Currently having like 50 servers with socket 1366, also some blades, the price to performance is just great for services which don't use insane amount of cpu ... but yeah im starting with the first E5 v1 servers as well.
Paying less than 90€ for two E5-2650v1 is great (8 cores 16 threads per cpu).
But i also have newer servers like E3-1230v6 / E5-1650v4 etc, but that's for different purposes (for example Game Services)
For HP G5 Servers it's true, starting at G6 they use much less power, some of mine are running with a whopping 510 day uptime since the last reboot, talk about more replacement lol.
Of course you should use new harddrives and no 5 year old sas drive for all your holy cat videos.
You should go for your dream ... but don't ever buy a SE326M1 or SE316M1 G6 HP Server ... i have one for backups ... you can literally hear it in all 3 floors ... and yes i found no way to throttle the fans.
lol I remember that was "just part of it". I haven't even bothered trying to cat5(6) the house. Next one, maybe.
@William from where did you buy the two DL360 ?
Ebay, as most i buy.
So true. Anything pre-G6 is useless in both processing power and power usage, plus partly DDR2. Also useless are nearly all ending in 5, indicating AMD Opteron servers - you are better off in this case with SuperMicro as you can get Quad socket systems for dual socket prices there.
DL360 G6 with 2x PSU - 75$:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-PROLIANT-DL360-G6-2X-E5540-2-53GHZ-NO-RAM-NO-HDD-P410i-ILO2-2PSU-/222446401764?hash=item33cad6b8e4:g:yQYAAOSwuLZY0FPM
Trays 5$ ea
RAM 8GB 16$ ea
X5650 (6x 2.66Ghz) 19$ ea
CPU power consumption, benchmark and ebay price table - currently the X5650 wins:
16$ ? .. damn ... sadly the cost of shipping to EU is really high, and also taxation on delivery ... in Germany they average around 22€ per stick.
HP dl160 g6 & dell r310/r410 are the winner for me currently having small rack and all works sooo good and also quiet
In this DIY power colaclaulations you all seem to forget that here are also FANS. And they can be power hungry too, especially if high capacity.
There's also mobo, loss on redundant PSU, etc.
Agreed. Refurbished servers is good idea to lowest the cost but it is depend on how critical of system required. Have to consider the downtime duration to be accepted.