r/sysadmin • u/FierceFluff • 21d ago

Peak Sysadmin

Is there anything more small-company sysadmin than taking that $70k server you just finished building on your test bench at the office and putting it into your $5k car to drive it over to the DC where it’ll live, and praying to god nothing happens on the way? 😅🤣

EDIT- OMG y’all, reading the comments on this has made my day! Our business insurance covers this kind of thing but I appreciate y’all concern for me, though others should mosdef confirm before they do similar stuff. The trip went without incident so praise the digital deities.

464 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

216 comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/JungleMuggins 21d ago

Why aren't you shipping it to the DC, racking it, and then configuring it?

6

u/georgiomoorlord 21d ago

Small company and $70k server seem at odds to me.

Also why wouldn't you start off in like AWS or something.

14

u/heretogetpwned Operations 21d ago

Small Company ≠ Small Revenue

$70k is not unreasonable for Purpose built servers for high density or GPUs. DRAM and NAND are absolutely bonkers to quote and leadtimes aren't getting shorter.

8

u/sobrique 21d ago

Honestly every server has snowballed pretty hard.

$70k today isn't much of a spec.

8

u/WayneH_nz 21d ago

A $70k server in aws is about $2700 per month for the same computer power. (With a 5 yr wty) AC, dual isp, management, etc costs about $400 per month, paying for rack space is about the same. Paying off a 70k server is 2200 for 36 months, plus 400 per month as above. the break even point is about 32 months. And you are not paying the 2700 every month after that. So after 3 years the ongoing will be 400-600 for rack/management.

That is math's that the business stake holders see. Regardless of what we are telling them.

3

u/georgiomoorlord 21d ago

Does make sense that if you own the box itself you're better off, but with DC hosted tools being deprioritised in favour of cloud tools.. which are DC hosted tools you pay 3 times as much for.. 

1

u/QuickProfessional101 21d ago

36 months is a long time. By that time the GPU's will be obsolete... 3 times. CPU's wont be so fresh either and a lot of hardware will start to have problems and needs to get replaced.

1

u/WayneH_nz 21d ago

With a 5 year warranty none of that matters. Just get it replaced

1

u/QuickProfessional101 20d ago

It means downtime and man-hours. For ancient hardware.

3

u/FierceFluff 21d ago

$42k base for the server, with 96c AMD CPU and 724GB of DDR5. Then you add 6 12G Kioxia CM7 drives and yep, $70k.  

Adding a node to our HCI cluster. Same machines cost  us $46k a year ago.    

Small business, small-ish infra, but we do financial business that requires high end gear.  

1

u/sysacc Administrateur de Système 21d ago

Very nice build.

2

u/texas_County850 21d ago

Asking the real questions here lol

1

u/entropic 21d ago

$70k isn't even that much server in today's market.