Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

I really like purchasing new hardware – it’s generally a fun thing to spend someones else’s money on shiny new toys in a 19″ form factor.

While people in bigger companies usually purchase their hardware by the sizing done on the requirements, in SMB environments you purchase by budget, and hope the budget is big enough to at least get near the requirements.

I usually deal with HP and IBM servers – i think they’re the same in pricing, features and problems. When trying to get most out of your budget, it’s usually necessary to draw up several different configurations, in order to get as many requirements fulfilled while not being over your spending limit. If you have a hardware supplier, they will can make you a quote, and tell you what it’s going to cost, but it’s usually easier to make a draft config on your own, and then ask your hardware supplier to give you a quote and delivery time.

In case you’re not an IT company, and you don’t have a direct ALSO IVIS account, i suggest you to get one (you can get one easily even if you’re not directly an IT company, you just need a “HR Auszug” and a letter signed by a “Unterschriftsberechtigter”). This will also help you to see if your hardware supplier is trying to make too much profit on you (they will have much more hw turnover than you, and thus even lower prices).

The easiest way to get a server configuration is to use the vendors supplied tools. HP offers a web interface, which you can access through your ALSO IVIS login, and get direct quotes. For IBM equipment, it’s a little bit more complicated (but IMHO nicer). You can download SSCT, the Standalone Solutions Configurator Tool. This tool can help you to configure servers, but you will only be able to see the official list price – you will need to cross check with ALSO to see the “real” prices.

Please note that both configurators don’t have any facility to see whether something is on stock or not. If you’re in need of a server fast, it’s usually best to print out a PDF list of a server with additional equipment directly from the ALSO IVIS web interface, this way you can configure the server “by hand” with a marker pen, and see what is directly available on stock.

A generally interesting observation i made is that the professional 1U servers with all the necessary options (iLO or RSAII, second PSU, RAID controller with cache) have almost the same price as a 2U server with the same options. As space is usually not at a premium in the SMB datacenter (or “The room with AC”), you will almost always be better of with 2U servers in the long term. It’s a different thing of course when we’re talking about co-location.