Systemax Servers - Who Uses them?

RobertKaucher

Back in July I purchased two Systemax servers with SATA drives for some non-critical systems. I like them alot and they were a very good price.

What I would like to know is this:
Who else here uses or has used Systemax? I think I asked this question before but the take is a little different. We are probably going to replace our SQL Server come this fall and I would like to know what kind of apps you guys have running on them.

BTW: These are also known as SuperMicro.

xenodamus

I'm a teacher and I see them in use in our school district. I don't have access to anything, of course, but I know the 2k8 DC/DHCP server and firewall on this campus are running on Systemax boxes.

RobertKaucher

I have actually found a few case studies of larger companies using them for SQL Server. These have included financial firms, etc that use load balancing and clustering. So that helps reassure me a little.

Here is what I am looking at:
Systemax Mission Performance 5500 Intel Dual Core Xeon based Build-to-Order SAS 2U Rackmount Server at TigerDirect

Dual Quads with 24 GB RAM. I just looking at maxing the memory so that I don't have to worry about any IO. 24 GB of RAM would hold all of our DBs in RAM easily.

tiersten

SuperMicro are okay. We don't use them at work but I'd be okay with using one. At work its all IBM or HP.

RobertKaucher

Thanks for the comments, guys.

citinerd

I have 2 decomissioned ones I purchased from a government surplus sale. No hard drives of course but thats not a problem. They run great have 4gb of mem on both and run some vm servers on them for practice. (Also have a crappy 1ghz compaq 1u server that I use for DHCP)

Hyper-Me

For a pretty small company I dont think id worry about using them.

For any company of any decent size id definitely use a major OEM, simply for the support/warranty packages.

TheShadow

Well if it is really "the" Supermicro then they are a major OEM. They are the only manufacturer to my knowledge of server level motherboards in the U.S. They are also a tier 1 beta test company for Intel CPU's and a few AMD CPU's Supermicro OEM's full boards and I.P. to third party builders. You might be using Supermicro I.P. without even knowing it. They are not generic box sellers so some may not have heard of them unless they are a hardware junkie. Check out their blades for example at http://www.supermicro.com/index.cfm some of it might look familiar.

So it really depends on if you are buying prepackaged or custom. I don't know if they still are now that Dell owns them but Alienware custom systems were Supermicro. There are still systems people with too much money who buy them for high end gaming and workstations.

RobertKaucher

Excellent. That's the type of info I really wanted to hear. Thank you.

Silentsoul

Marshall 8e6 uses super micro 1u servers for their reporters and blocking software. It runs either RedHat or Centos and a pretty large database depening on users. Marshal8e6 is a blocking hardware/software vendor much like iprisim.

Paule123

Did some testing of VMWare on something very similar, sure it was the same kit just rebranded (cant remember the name though).

Wouldnt use them in our production environment though, cant turn my back on HP just yet...

Used Systemax desktops years ago though lasted ages and ages until they were refreshed

Hyper-Me

Oh im not knocking their quality.

Its just hard to match the support network of HP, Dell, IBM, etc when you have a mission critical, under-warranty server that just big the big one and you need a part NOW.

RobertKaucher

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Oh im not knocking their quality.

Its just hard to match the support network of HP, Dell, IBM, etc when you have a mission critical, under-warranty server that just big the big one and you need a part NOW.

Yes, I agree with this. After pricing out some Dell builds of similar config this morning, I think I am going to go with them for the SQL Server. But I am going to put the file server on one of these unless I get a better deal from one of the bids. Thanks to all.

MentholMoose

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Its just hard to match the support network of HP, Dell, IBM, etc when you have a mission critical, under-warranty server that just big the big one and you need a part NOW.

In some cases it can make sense to have no support contact at all and use the (possibly massive) savings to buy spares (parts, maybe even servers).

Hyper-Me

MentholMoose wrote: »

In some cases it can make sense to have no support contact at all and use the (possibly massive) savings to buy spares (parts, maybe even servers).

Yes but this reminds me of the GX270 fiasco...

We were using 20 in a lab and every single PS failed within 12 hours of each other. It wasn't environment, but rather the massive PS and Mobo failures suffered by that model that somehow struck all at once.

tiersten

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Yes but this reminds me of the GX270 fiasco...

We were using 20 in a lab and every single PS failed within 12 hours of each other. It wasn't environment, but rather the massive PS and Mobo failures suffered by that model that somehow struck all at once.

From what I heard, those were using the defective electrolytic capacitors. The story is that there was industrial espinonage involved where an incomplete electrolyte formula was stolen and put into production. The missing component was something that would prevent the electrolyte from degrading from general use and without that, they'd all eventually go bad.

Zartanasaurus

tiersten wrote: »

From what I heard, those were using the defective electrolytic capacitors. The story is that there was industrial espinonage involved where an incomplete electrolyte formula was stolen and put into production. The missing component was something that would prevent the electrolyte from degrading from general use and without that, they'd all eventually go bad.

At my last job we had several hundred IBM 6840 workstations and the motherboards on almost every one failed. IBM was nice enough to extend the warranty, but they continued to fail after the extended warranty was up.

It's a cheap fix, but I don't know how to solder.