My boss asked me to make a hardware list and a price estimate for a new server we are going to get. Howerver we are not going to directly buy it, for legal reasons the specs have to be published and we get offers by other companies. I am extremly under quallified. Has anyone got any experience on estimating prices, how do you approach it?
You provide us with very little information. Do you want a rackmount vs tower server, does it need to be quiet or will it be in a closet/server room, ARM vs Intel/AMD X86-x64, application used (ex. NAS, SAN, database, VM’s, etc).
A good place to start looking is on big OEM’s websites like Dell (PowerEdge), HP (ProLiant), Lenovo (ThinkCentre/Thinkstation/ThinkSystem).
Also, keep in mind any computer can be used as a server. Depending on your application will determine the features you need (ECC, lots of PCIe slots, 20+ HDD slots, 25Gbe, lots of RAM, high number of cores vs high speed cores, etc.).
You need to give us a lot more info.
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It going to be a rackmount emailserver and website host. It does not have to be quiet. The spec list is more or less
12C/24T
X86-x64
128GB ECC
2.5Gig lan
2x2TB Harddrive
250GB SSD.
I’m more interested in finding out how people estimate prices, rather than a specific estimate. I might have to do this again and don’t want to harras the Level1 community every time :D.
Having purchased multiple servers for a public university with a very strict multiple bid process, what I did was simply ask for quotes from multiple vendors (like Thinkmate, Aspen Systems, etc) for roughly comparable specs. Just be up front about your purchasing process.
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You need to straight up request quotes from companies, if you are in the EDU/Non-Profit segment you need to request EDU/Non-Profit prices as most companies will give you discounts, but you need to request them and possibly fill out some forms, well worth the effort.
If you need company names/sites: (in alphabetical order)
Most of those are custom and you can configure pretty much as you wish. Not including the major players as they limit your config (not that yours does not fit) and they are more personable and you can work better deals.
Cheapest I could quickly configure for your listed config is $4,417. You listed some details but you’ll need to be more specific or budget to narrow it down. Items such as, two CPU’s, Intel vs AMD, RAM to be expandable or not, redundant power supply, 1U or 2U does it matter, IPMI option, OS to be installed or are you?
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Would it need licenses etc, for ipmi or anything?
Presumably OP’s organisation would already have it’s email server license, but would they also have to purchase an OS license/hypervisor licence etc for this box?
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These three specs are like, $200-$300 in total ($40-$60 for each drive and $30-$50 for NIC). Why you wouldn’t spend $200 more on NVMe SSDs and a 64 GB Optane beats me, but your choice!
For the rest, shop around for a server with 128 GB ECC RAM and 24 threads. Hardware should land around 4 000 dollars total but you could get significantly lower with rebates or sales.
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