Replacing a Personal Rack-Mounted Server?

Starky writes "Many moons ago, I cobbled together a 1U rack mount from parts which has since been diligently serving up my homepage and web sites for family and friends. It's a truly "Mom and Pop Shop" setup, running on a rack secluded in a closet at home over a DSL line. At the time, I was able to piggyback my order on a large order placed by a company for which I was working, allowing me to get a substantial discount. Now, the time has come to consider a replacement. However, I no longer work at a company that orders chassis and chips by the dozen. I would like to get a rack-mountable chassis, but don't know where to go as a lowly individual consumer looking for a box with minimal specifications (1 processor, dual drives, and 1G RAM is about all I need) at a reasonable price. Any recommendation from Slashdotters who maintain their own rigs?"

Reuse the chassis

[eln]

The rack-mounted chassis is what costs more than the normal PC parts, so just re-use the one you already have and order the rest of it from anywhere. You should be able to buy what you're looking for for less than $400 if you don't have to order the chassis.

Desktop chassis is more appropriate

[Ted Cabeen]

The one thing I will note about rackmount servers is that they are all very noisy. For home installation, a desktop chassis will nearly always fit your needs and will be much quieter and more power-efficient than a rackmount. I recently replaced my home server with about $850 in parts from newegg. If you're interested in making a quiet desktop, take a look at SilentPCReview [silentpcreview.com].

If you're set on a rackmount server, I've been very happy with Silicon Mechanics [siliconmechanics.com], but their cheapest machine is still ~$1000.

Just upgrade

[LWATCDR]

NewEgg or ZipZoomFly have motherboards, CPUs, Drives, and memory. But the big question is why update? What is wrong with the current server? I am sure you could saturate that DSL line with the server you have so why upgrade? Maybe just upgrade the disk? Or maybe more memory.

Your other option is to watch Geeks.com. Every now and then they have cheap refurbished servers.

Re:Are your needs that great

[shadow349]

I am just in the process of evaluating a new server to replace my home rack-mount.

As the previous poster mentioned, if you don't need a lot of power, the D-Link DNS323 [dns323.info] with two SATA drives might fit the bill. I just got one and put in two 500GB drives. So far, it is doing a good job replacing my home server for file serving, web serving, email, dns, dhcp, and rtorrent.

It cost about $300 ($160 for the unit, 2 x $70 for the drives on sale). The big payoff is that it uses (well, supposed to use since I haven't thrown the kill-a-watt on it yet) about 50W instead of the 250W that my current server uses.

200W * 24 hrs * 365 days / 1000 * .17 = $297.87 savings in power per year

It will pay for itself in 12 months.

surpluscomputers or geeks.com

[slashkitty]

both have slightly older rack mounted computers on the cheap. in the order of $100 - $400. I've seen a dual xeon with 4 drives for like $250.

Does it have to be 1U?

[Fallen Kell]

I am just wondering if it has to be 1U. You can get a nice 4U server complete for $350. It is close to your specs already. Just upgrade RAM, and add a second hard drive, possibly upgrade processor (it has an Intel 775 socket motherboard with 1066FSB Core 2 Duo processor support). So $30 for extra RAM, $60 for disk, and possibly $200 for new CPU, you are still just in the $500-600 range, which isn't bad at all. http://www.superlogics.com/rackmount-computer/rackmount-computers/SL-4U-CL-M900-HA/316-2541.htm [superlogics.com]

Re:Are your needs that great

[B'Trey]

I've been running whitebox servers like that at home for years but recently decided, like the original poster, that I wanted to go with a rackmount setup. If you're deadset on building a custom system, then I can't offer much advise. Me, I picked up a couple of these. [geeks.com]

Even after paying shipping and picking up a could of larger hard drives, I don't think I could have build a similar system any cheaper. One is my mail/web server and the other is an internal domain controller and file server.

They don't come with rails, so they're sitting on shelves in my rack rather than actually installed but I can live with that.

System76

[Rinisari]

www.system76.com [system76.com] if you're into Ubuntu...

Where to buy a server

[JWSmythe]

My friends, their friends, and their friends (like, people I've never heard of), always end up coming to me for this same advice.

    Sometimes I give/sell them parts out of my garage, because their old equipment also somehow ends up in my garage. :)

    I tend to like SuperMicro equipment, so if you have a few bucks to spend, go find yourself a nice SuperMicro 1u. But since this is your personal machine, and you don't have a huge budget, you'll have to shop like I do.

    Check out the VisionMan machines on tigerdirect.com. For about $550, you can get a 2Ghz dual core with 1Gb RAM, 2 160Gb SATA drives

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/search.asp?page=2&mnf=1286&sort=Price%20asc [tigerdirect.com]

    I haven't bought any yet, but if I ever run out of parts in my garage for new servers, I'll probably buy one. :)

    You can always go browsing on eBay. Sometimes you'll find a good deal, but generally you're not going to get much decent for under $500. There are resellers on there all the time, who grab up anything cheap (or bid them up to over $500), that they're going to sell to their customers. If you do, be cautious of home built machines. They're the best thing in the world if they're done right, but if they weren't, you can experience lots of nasty problems. Like, if there isn't enough air flow, the CPU can overheat, and in a week or two you may end up looking for a new machine again.

    I was building my own 1u machines for quite a while. When we approached 1Ghz, I had to start doing some special cooling. After that, since the company was making good money, it was cost effective to get the SuperMicro machines.

    The final option is... I needed an incoming mail server to filter viruses and spam. This was a rather urgent matter, and I didn't really have time to go through my garage piecing a machine together and test it. I also didn't have time to order anything. I went down to CompUSA (they re-opened close to my house), and picked up an eMachines AMD64 with 1Gb ram for $250. It's a tower case, but if I felt ambitious (which I didn't that night), I could have easily rebuilt it into a spare 2u case. The memory was not seated well when I unboxed it, but that's the only problem that it's had so far, and it's been running hard for a few weeks.

Check out Epic Systems

[JohnnyGTO]

They specialize in like new lease returned hardware, including Big Iron. I got an HP Proliant from them for a song last year. www.escorp.com

Quiet low power 1U

[DDumitru]

I have build a couple of these for colos, but they are low cost, quiet, and low power, so you might be interested.

Start with a Supermicro 1U 510. This is 11" deep with an 80+ efficiency 200W power supply. It will house most uATX motherboards, although you will have to nibble out the back panel to get non supermicro boards to fit.

Then add a low cost AMD socket-AM2 motherboard.

Put a low power 45W dual core like a BE-2400 or one of the newer series. You will need a 1U blower for this.

Put one 3.5" drive (or up to 4 2.5" drives).

With a Gigabyte board and 1 2.5" HDD + 1 2.5" SSD, my system draws 37 watts in use as measured from the power line. It is not 100% quiet, but is the quietest of any 1U I have worked with.

Why?

[leoxx]

1 processor, dual drives, and 1G RAM is about all I need

Perhaps I am confused. Why exactly do you want a rack-mounted server for this? Why not just use an old PC, most people have scads of these things sitting around. Better yet, use something like the VIA NAS 7800 [via.com.tw] and throw it in a nice small quiet case. Compared to some crappy old 1U server, you'll save hundreds of dollars a year in electricity costs alone if the thing is on 24x7.

Re:Consider the Geode or a Via C7

[LWATCDR]

I have seen Via cpu/motherboard combos on newegg for under $50. Really cheap and low power. The motherboard for the GPC that Walmart was selling also runs about $50.

Rack mount is dying

[pseudorand]

Are you #()*& insane? Why would you want a rack mount anything, especially in your home? Rack stuff, especially 1U, is noisy (it has to have small fans that spin really fast) and it's an inconvenient form factor unless you really need to pack a lot of equipment into a space. The rack alone takes up 21"x42"xheight, so unless you actually need something on the order of 336 CPU cores (42U of two-way quad cores), rack mount is a horrible idea. Ditch the rack and buy yourself a Shuttle barebones P238 (no, I don't work for them, but I do have shelves, not racks, full of them and they work great). Put 8G of memory, a few Raptor HDs, and a quad core in it and the whole thing will be less than $2500 from NewEgg for a sweet system. Then, put it any where you please because it's dead quiet and always ice cold (we do weather modeling on them, so we run the CPUs at 100% for days at a time).

Use a hosting company...

[tgd]

Seriously.

I used to have a dual CPU P3 1U rackmount server I used for those sort of things. A day of running it through a Kill-A-Watt showed me it was costing almost $40 a month in electricity.

That buys a LOT of hosting when you look at places like dreamhost, etc.

weird stuff warehouse

[Polo]

I got a small 1U 150w celeron system for less than $50, but you have to go in to find that kind of stuff.

They have nice current systems too.

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=10174 [weirdstuff.com]

highly recommended

Want a cheap refurb with serious geek cred?

[mr_mischief]

Consider Anysystem.com [anysystem.com], where you can get dirt-cheap Sun gear. Check out the Ugly Duckling specials for working systems with cosmetic damage dirt cheap. They sell IBM server stuff, too, but that's pretty much all marked "call for pricing".

Building your own

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Unless you're really strapped for space, you can save a good chunk of money by going with something other than a 1U chassis. 2U costs less than 1U (generally). 3U costs less than 2U, and 4U is generally way cheaper than 3U. 4U is the sweet spot since it's little more than a mid-tower case turned on its side -- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!

There's other reasons to go with a 4U case. You can use standard PSU's in a 4U case. You can use standard PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards in a 4U case (or a 3U in some cases). For 1U or 2U you'll either need low profile cards (2U only) or you'll need a riser card.

Another nice thing about any case bigger than 1U is that you generally don't need any special motherboard. You'll need a special heatsink that blows from the side for a 2U, but 3U and 4U can typically use any old HSF you have laying around.

Now, that being said, I just built four 2U servers for my home rendering studio. This is what I bought:

CASE
Chenbro 2U (PN# 21508B) [chenbro.com]
This is an excellent server case. It offers eight hot-plug SATA drive slots (SAS is optional). It holds any typical ATX/E-ATX server board. 2U PSU's up to 650W are available.

Motherboard
Tyan Thunder S3992-E dual Socket-1207 [tyan.com]
I've got four of these, each with two Opteron 2220 CPU's and 8GB of RAM. One of them has an Areca SATA RAID controller running eight 1TB drives as my primary file server. These come with dual Gigabit Ethernet links and a single 10/100 link.

Good luck!

Cheap rack mount equipment

[Xoc-S]

First you need a rack. I got my rack at the local used computer equipment store in Seattle, RE-PC. Got a 75U rack for $75. Didn't need that much U space, but allows for further expansion. 45U takes as much floor space as 12U!

Next you need cases. I got 4U cases. There are lots around. As others have mentioned, 4U cases allow you to use any standard hardware.

Next you need slide rails. Search for "rack mount slide rails" on eBay. I bought from ArrowMax for $18, plus shipping. The shipping is expensive, so buy all the rails you will need at once. Rails work just fine.

Since I use 4U cases, almost any motherboard will work. I had to search to find a commodity motherboard that supports ECC memory. They don't tend to say that in the descriptions for non-server motherboards on NewEgg, so you have to look in the downloaded manual for a BIOS setting that allows you to turn on ECC support. I wouldn't run a server without ECC memory.

Many KVM's are rack mountable already--you want the little L shaped mounting brackets. Don't need a KVM for a single server, of course. Also bought 24 port network switch at RE-PC for cheap. Works just fine. Use a small keyboard and minimal LCD screen.

I'm really happy with my rack. All blinken-lighten and all.