A friend of mine needs to replace his old servers and has a pretty limited budget. His IT staffs has suggested building their own servers instead of buying branded ones and he sought my opinion.
Given that:
- High availability isn’t a priority and they already have manual in house processes for dealing with any reasonable down time
- They are in an industry that is not heavily IT dependent
- Emails (downtime under 2 hours acceptable)
- Shared folders (downtime under 2 hours acceptable)
- A line of business app that runs off SQL Server 2003 (downtime under 2 days acceptable)
- None of the services need to run 24x7 and can be shut down after office hours
- They have two in-house IT technicians that are reasonably competent
And their data protection plans include:
- Using RAID 1 for each visualization hosts and a RAID 10 for file storage
- Syncing all shared folders, application data and emails every 30 minutes onto a dedicated backup machine with two separate hard disks, one for odd days and the other for even
- Images of virtual machines are cross replicated between two hosts and backed up weekly. In the event that one goes down, they can start up the VMs on the other and just restore any missing data
- Dedicated backup machine in turn dumps everything onto a mobile hard disk nightly for offsite storage
With cost savings of around 40% and probably better performance, does it make sense for them to build their own servers from mostly consumer grade parts instead of buying one from either HP or Dell?
I have always advocated getting brand name servers but this is one of those times where I think a case can be made for building their own?
