Holy crap, server pricing has come down a lot in the last month!
Four weeks ago a Dell R810 with 256 GB of RAM, dual Intel 6550 8-core CPUs, and the standard complement of drives, warranties, etc. was almost $28,000.
A couple weeks ago the AMD-based Dell R815 was released, featuring the AMD 8- and 12-core CPUs. A similar configuration to the R810 above comes to almost $17,000, and that’s with more cores in the host than the Intel.
Now the Dell R810, same configuration, is a little over $18,000.
I’ve not been a big fan of AMD’s technology in the past, because of caching bugs, OS incompatibilities, general BS, etc. However, for what they just saved me by keeping Intel honest I might buy a test server based on their CPUs and take another look. 🙂
Also, the Dell R910 can have 1 TB of RAM in it now. A fully decked-out R910 with 1 terabyte of RAM and 32 CPU cores is $72,000. Depreciated over 5 years (which is the maximum hardware warranty), that’s only $14,400 each year.
I really want one.
Only 14,400? Haha, that’s like my server budget for a whole year!
Wait wait wait, you guys have /budgets/? Like, you know, beforehand, how much money you’re going to have to buy machines?
Whoa. I may have to look into that.
Yeah, there are times when I think the place I work is f’ed up, but there are other times I think it’s pretty cool. Like having budgets. 🙂
Of course, a budget is now what is preventing me from buying one of those monster boxes… Damn!
🙂
I must be building it wrong, or Dell is really shafting its K-12 customers, because I can’t build that server (online) for less than about $26K. Dropping to 128GB ram gets me there…
Yeah, it looks like their prices changed again. My suggestion is to get a machine specification together and email it to your Dell rep for a quote. The end of the quarter is a good time to get good pricing…