
Ask HN: Used Dell Poweredge C6100 servers + colo or AWS? - manishsharan
I am a solo bootstrapper and I am trying  to figure out whether I should get 4 x  c6100 servers ( 2 x Intel Xeon L5639 + 96GB per  + 250gb SSD  - per node , 4 nodes per server)  for about US$7k +approximately  $4k for annual colo charges or scale up using AWS. The Dell servers are from ebay and their longevity&#x2F;reliability is questionable. I will also be using a managed hub  ( still deciding brand -- but will buy used from ebay)
 I plan to buy four of those for redundancy. The colo would be within driving distance of my home.<p>My environment  has Mongo , Redis, NGINX , beanstalkd and glassfish app servers  and I expect to do a lot of video transcoding  using FFMpeg ( If I manage to get traction).
With dell c6100, I am getting a lot of CPU cores and memory and SSD that I could never afford on AWS. I probably don&#x27;t need this kind of capacity in the first few months of my launch but I am hopeful that my business would grow.<p>Could HNers with more wisdom and experience in these decisions please share their experience with this decision. Also feel free to critique this idea.
Thanks!
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mtrimpe
I bought a similar setup for a similar purpose a long time ago and unless you
want to offer custom ffmpeg encoding beyond what Zencoder / AWS / TransloadIt
offer my advice would be to use them instead.

If you really want to; I still have a 4x 3GHz Xeon server with 48Gb of memory
and 8 450Gb 3k-RPM SAS drives in RAID-6 running in a colo. You're more than
welcome to take it off my hands. I don't think it's load ever got above a few
% :)

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manishsharan
Awesome I would love to take this off your hands. Could I email you later on
at your email address in HN profile ?

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benologist
I would suggest you look at just leasing an ordinary dedicated through these
guys, who I used for ~3 years.

[https://hivelocity.net/dedicated-servers/intel-xeon-
lynnfiel...](https://hivelocity.net/dedicated-servers/intel-xeon-lynnfield/)

Dual e5 2620 + 96gb ram + 480gb ssd for $493/month, and in 6 to 12 months
you'll be able to shift to a bigger server at a lower price.

Benefits are:

\- the physical server and network are always their problem

\- you don't have to slap $7k down now

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manishsharan
I will book mark this. However, the problem I see with something like this is
redundancy -- I would need atleast 2 servers and that would add up to USD 12k
per annum.

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benologist
Yeah redundancy is going to be expensive. Was your $7k+4k per server or was
that for a pair?

It wouldn't hurt to use AWS as a backup though - if you're unexpectedly
offline for 24 hours just fire up a big server that is affordable for a short
burst.

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manishsharan
Each Dell Peoweredge c6100 is around USD$ 1500 -- each server contains 4 nodes
. Each node is a dual CPU server with its own RAID ,network port and IPMI
port.I think only the power supply is shared with all 4 nodes. have 2 or 3 of
these kind of gives a lot of redundancy. The CPU is kinda dated and slow
though.

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benologist
I think I would try just one plus AWS-for-emergencies first.

Or possibly [http://zencoder.com/en/](http://zencoder.com/en/) until the
expense justifies investing in your own hardware.

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manishsharan
There are several forums discussing Dell poweredge C6100. This is a review I
can point to : [http://www.servethehome.com/Server-detail/dell-
poweredge-c61...](http://www.servethehome.com/Server-detail/dell-
poweredge-c6100-xs23-ty3-cloud-server-2u-4-node-8-sockets/). There may be
others. I have not come across any glaring issues with this so far .

