Server cost

partyguinness

How much approx should I expect to pay an IT contractor for this server?


HPE ProLiant ML350 Gen10 Server Processor: 1 x Intel Xeon Silver 4210 / 2.2 GHz (3.2 GHz) (10-core)

RAM: 32 GB (installed) / 768 GB (max) - DDR4 SDRAM - Advanced ECC Hard Drive(s) 8x Samsung 250GB Solid State Drive / RAID 10 (2TB total available storage)

Optical Storage: No optical drive Video Memory: 16 MB Power Redundancy: Yes Operating System: Windows Server 2019 Standard Edition User Cals: 10


We are a small business with 8 employees with PCs



Cheers.

ED E

8x 250GB SSDs seems like a nuts setup.

partyguinness

ED E wrote: »

8x 250GB SSDs seems like a nuts setup.

You will have to forgive me but I have no idea what it means.


What I pasted was put to us as an option.

smuggler.ie

partyguinness wrote: »

Advanced ECC Hard Drive(s) 8x Samsung 250GB Solid State Drive / RAID 10 (2TB total available storage)

It should read 1TB total available storage if in RAID 10 (2TB physical)
Not an expert, but SSD for storage sound overkill, unless required by some application

shanec1928

id stick with HPE drives and not use a third party. HPE had been pretty particular with this in the past unless they have changed there tune in the last year or so.

dhaughton99

smuggler.ie wrote: »

It should read 1TB total available storage if in RAID 10 (2TB physical)
Not an expert, but SSD for storage sound overkill, unless required by some application

Not really overkill as prices for SSDs are pretty good. Worth doing them for a new system.

whippet

I wouldn't recommend putting in third party drives - HP don't really like that especially when it comes to warranties.

If this was all HPE kit (SSD Drives) I'd say your looking at about the same 3.8k ex VAT. The supplier is probably paying less for Samsung drives than HPE so are making a saving there. HPE drives are about 200 + VAT each.

The Server license and cals - probably about 1500 ex VAT (it's a while since I looked at MS Server pricing)

I don't see a mention of a HP Carepack (extended warranty) on the server - I'd never recommend buying one without it.

Darwin

Unless you have some some business specific package that needs to be on a local server, why aren't you considering cloud based solutions?
Just to throw out some examples:
Mail server? Consider Office 365 with email Outlook as the client.
File server? Have a look at box.com or Microsoft onedrive
Accounting server? Sage (amongst others) offer cloud solutions
Print server? Definitely old school here, most modern printers have built in wifi and file services.

You should at least weigh up the costs of cloud based solutions vs maintaining your own server infrastructure in-house.

whippet

That is a very basic server and I'd suggest there is a real probability that the IT Contractor is just replacing an existing bit of tin as it's easier.

For small businesses I'd never recommend buying servers anymore. As pointed out above the cloud based offerings are far better and you are getting enterprise resilience at a much cheaper cost and you don't have to worry about heat and cooling.

As we don’t know anything about the environment there may well be a legacy application in use that can’t be moved to the cloud – but it should be investigated to see if there is an alternative

ZENER

Totally agree with the Cloud based offerings. Little or no maintenance cost, Office 365 gives up to 1TB of storage per seat. SharePoint is more generous and is less costly in the long run for storage and sharing.

Sage and Red Books (Cloud) as well as many other vendors offer Cloud based versions of their products.

Cloud also makes working on the road/from home a breeze.

Where I work we have a small HP single Xeon CPU with 6 ITB drives for stuff we like to keep local and a couple of VMs.

We have nearly 2000 staff at the moment spread all over the country and we couldn't work without Office365/SharePoint.

As for legacy apps you can migrate the appliance to a VM in Azure.

Ken

ED E

partyguinness wrote: »

You will have to forgive me but I have no idea what it means.


What I pasted was put to us as an option.

If thats what they're trying to sell you on and you don't have some insane requirement for storage IOPs then I'd say walk away.


If the business has horrendous connectivity then a local box could make sense, otherwise cloud hosted solutions are probably plenty. Most offices just need a shared pool of documents which OneDrive will do. An AD has its uses but for very small SME may not even be required.