Who will be the lucky customer to grab this collector’s item from eBay? This Dell Poweredge R820 server sells for a mere $1,200 (less than 1,700 Australian Dollars), about one hundredth its original selling price, talk about depreciation!
Yes, it’s located in Canberra, yes, it is a refurbished, 13-year old antiquated dinosaur in tech terms. But where else can you get a relatively cheap and affordable computer with 1TB of RAM, yes RAM- albeit the DDR3L type.
There’s 32 memory modules, each with a 32GB capacity so that’s less than $40 per stick (and just over $1 per GB), manufactured by SK Hynix. The same registered ECC (HMT84GR7AMR4A-H9) memory costs almost $60 in the US.
1TB DDR5 memory would set you back more than 10 times this price! So you’re essentially getting the rest of the server for free.
Dell PowerEdge R820 deal
And what a system it is! This is a rare quad-CPU server; each processor has eight cores/16 threads. Granted, these are Intel Xeon E5-4640 types, a 95W CPU launched almost 14 years ago, with a single-thread performance that’s vastly inferior to the Intel N100.
However, there are four of them, making it a fantastic, dirt-cheap way of running virtual machines via Proxmox or ESXi.
There’s plenty of connectivity options as well: two Fibre Channel cards (16GbE?), two SPF+ ports (10GbE), two Ethernet ports (Gigabit), a standard serial port, VGA ports, an iDRAC management port, a SAS connector to connect to external storage, USB and even a SD card slot.
Storage-wise, you get a pair of 10K SAS HDD and a single 800GB Intel DC S3700 SSD, just a SATA drive, but still very capable. Oh, and don’t forget the DVD drive and the pair of 1100W redundant power supply units.
Just as a caveat, shipping that monster to anywhere in the world will cost a lot of money, it has no rack rail (you won’t be able to mount), and there’s obviously no warranty.
And do not underestimate the power consumption on this server; it will likely consume almost 1Kwh costing you more annually, at least in the UK, than the price of the server itself. Think of it as an electric heater that’s also a server. Madness!
Gemini also tells me that it was never designed to be quiet (after all, it lived all its life in a data center in Australia). When it boots up, expect to experience something akin to a Boeing 747 taking off from your workbench, probably complete with the vibrations.
Also consider
If you missed out on that deal, then consider this Cisco UCS B440 blade server with four Intel Xeon E7-4870, four 300GB Intel SATA SSDs and 1TB of DDR3 RAM for a mere AU$3,799 (about $2,700). Yes, it is also based in Australia for some odd reason.
For a bit more, and a US shipper, this Sun Oracle ZS-4 ZFS storage server has 64 (yes 64) 16GB DDR3 memory modules with a pair of 600GB HGST 10K SAS HDDs and a bunch of other components as well. It costs significantly more with a sticker price just over $3,000 but you can make an offer.
Our last candidate is UK-based. Eight HP Proliant s6500 4U racks are on sale with eight nodes in each. Each node has two CPUs and 128GB RAM, totalling 1TB of system memory (128 8GB modules). At around $3230, it’s quite a bargain if you know what you’re doing and the seller will take offers as well.
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desire.athow@futurenet.com (Desire Athow)
