Hello!
As part of a recent (and ongoing) process to upgrade the internal network here to 10gb fibre, I suddenly realized that a pretty core server had no remaining PCI x16 slots to fit a fibre card.
The current server is:
Asus TUF B450-PLUS GAMING board
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor (16 thread)
4 x 16gb Corsair CMK32GX4M2Z3600C20 (2666)
3 x 4tb SSDs
Radeon HD 4670 (just for basic video output)
LSI SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2
The board is mounted in a no-name rackmount case with a SAS backplane (hence the LSI card to connect the board to the backplane) with hot-swap bays. I really love the hot-swap bays.
Now, while I could start sawing the teeth off the PCI connector on the GPU in a desperate attempt to fit it into one of the remaining PCI x1 slots, I thought instead it might be time to upgrade slightly. I can recycle the parts of the existing server into a small workstation, so nothing in there right now will go to waste.
The existing server is used for a Postgres cluster running on a ZRAID1 pool, running numerous services as podman containers on Rocky Linux 9. I run a lot of open source server software, and I develop multiple open source server applications of my own, so they’re all running on there in some form. The machine is lightly to moderately loaded, and I believe the workload is largely memory and I/O bound right now. That particular server has no use for GPU compute (I’m intending to build a dedicated machine for that in the next year or two). I’ll be expanding the ZFS array with more SSDs in the medium term.
I’m in the UK, so my hardware choices are fairly limited, and hardware prices are generally “take the dollar amount, change the dollar sign to a pound sign, and add 20%”. Money is not in desperate supply, but I can’t really justify dumping multiple £thousands into this particular machine.
I’m looking at various options, but I’ve previously bought refurbished hardware from a company here called Bargain Hardware (they’re a pretty conventional reseller of refurbished server hardware; I can’t post links on the forum but they’re not hard to find) with good results.
They give quite a lot of choice in terms of what CPU and peripherals will be used in their custom builder, so I was looking at the following:
Dell PowerEdge R740
2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6138 20-Core 2.00GHz
4 x 32GB - DDR4 2666MHz (PC4-21300, 2Rx4)
I can reuse the existing disks, and the Dell also comes with a Dell BCM57840S 10gb fibre card as standard. The price of that build hovers around ÂŁ800-ÂŁ1000 depending on options. I largely selected that CPU from their list of options because it was the cheapest option in the list that benchmarked higher than the existing 3700X.
My hard requirements are:
- What I get shouldn’t be a downgrade. I don’t care if the result is not a big upgrade, though.
- I can probably live with staying at 64gb of memory, but I’d happily take 128gb if it doesn’t incur a huge cost increase.
- Lots of database, lots of services, lots of kernel threads; more cores are probably better even if they’re individually slower.
- It needs to be able to support 10gb fibre (in other words; room for a PCI x16 card).
- It needs to be able to support hot-swap bays. Either from a SAS card, or because the board natively supports SAS.
- It needs at least a VGA out so that I can see the bios and get console access for repairs.
- It obviously needs to be rackmount, because it’s going in the rack.
My main question: Is the refurbished R740 a smart use of ÂŁ800-ÂŁ1000? Can I get more for my money if I take some other route?
