- Single E5603 processor
- 16gb ram
- perc h700
tbh, especially since you have the netapps, this is not worth fooling with.
Think of the netapps as enabling you to use any chassis you want… you need not be constrained to an old server/rack.
on a per-core basis any cpu of the last 3 years, even an i3 or a ryzen 3, will be 3-4x the realized ipc of the e series xeons… and faster memory/platform/etc… it’s a no brainer.
an amd 5600g 6 core or whatever you can get for the $200-$300 range with the proper lsi card will absolutely destroy any older stuff because we’ve come so far in a very very short time
Imagine you have a really awesome antique lantern you want to use
but instead of doing that we just put in a lithium polymer battery and a really bright LED…
that’s what we’d be doing putting a newer server in front of those netapp shelves. it doesn’t make economic sense for your power bill or complexity to try to keep the old stuff going when you will need the same cabling and physical interfaces to your netapp shelves when you can use a different platform with a little more longevity than that
ofc you dont get to use the 12 3.5" in the back plane… you only use the netapp shelves… thats fine imho?
and you can use whatever local 2.5 or even 3.5" drives you have for the front-end computer that’s going to run the disk shelves.
one of those gives you dual redundant paths to 2 disk shelves and will work in a pcie 3 x16 slot (make sure it has airflow, you might have to build that!) and the cables to go from that to the netapp are $100ish each. which stings more than anything else in this whole setup.
its like $400 of cables and $400 of literally the entirefront end computer with 32-64gb memory that will run circles around the e5603 and the perc h700 is more headache than the $29 of that lsi controller
I’ve seen surplus actions with i.e. dell x740s which are skylake gen xeons go for $100-$150 w/o ram or drives (but with cpus, usually a pair of bronze or sliver cpus)… you could do that maybe and throw in a $29 lsi card and make out like a bandit