Tagged: hardware

Ever since the Dell Outlet was first introduced I have had a fascination with owning a high specification server. Being the geek that I am, the thought of loading up a database with hundreds of millions of data items, whether thats Microsoft SQL Server or one of the many NoSQL solutions available is something that one day I will experience.

Obviously having experience as a software consultant for a number of major clients I have had the fortune to work on real world application architecture for relatively large scale. As an example, my last project involved web platform that served 3 million visitors per month.

This post is bought on by my initial shock at a few of the servers offered on the outlet at the moment. My usual filtering involves ramping the RAM filter as high as possible, currently that is 36GB+, and the order by price descending. At first I thought it was a typo, but the first result was outrageous. For a “mere” 39,980USD I could be the proud owner of a 4x 6 core Intel Xeon E7540 (24 cores, 48 threads) and an obscene 1TB RAM.

The second result was equally as mouth-watering. 33,209USD would get me 8x 6 core Intel Xeon X5660 (48 core, 96 threads), 96GB RAM, but 24x 600GB 2.5” SCSI Hotplug Hard Drives.

Back to reality for a minute, 2,399USD would get me 2x 8 core AMD Opteron 6134 (16 core, 16 thread) with 64GB RAM; I am hoping that Santa picks up on my hints.