​what exactly do home users put on these servers. Im interested to know now :sunglasses:

OK I'll bite - how do they make you a tidy sum?

You can get really good value rack servers of fleabay. Lots of old rack mounted kit gets sold all the time. Not always the best for home users though as they can be noisy, thirsty and heavy.

My best bargain purchase was a ex Google Search Appliance, quick BIOS patch and its a fully fledged Dell R710. Came with 144GB Ram, 2x L5640 Xeons and 6x1TB drives, only cost me £150. Downside was I had to drive 200 miles to pick it up as it weighed so much, but worth it. :smile:

Regards
Flea

Keep an eye out for offers on new kit, given the low end stuff on modern kit can usually keep up with higher spec stuff on old kit.

It's fine for Lab use or somewhere where you don't care about the power use but certainly at datacentre pricing I wouldn't want anything but modern kit.

It all comes down to budget really, i've been looking at bargain Hardware's C6220's they look brilliant but just over the top for me at the moment.

I'd be looking at a minimum for an E3-xxxx or E5-xxxx preferably Sandy-bridge or newer. A single Proc Quad core E3 will come close to beating both of those CPU's together at a lot less power draw.

The CPUs are ancient:

Processor Number E5606
Status End of Life
Launch Date Q1'11

If you a running this in your house the waste energy is actually cutting your heating bills.

What would you suggest, something like a DL380p Gen8? These G7's aren't exactly old and from my experience not too bad on power usage.

I've got a load of these spare at work, decided against bringing a couple home due to heat, noise and cost to run.

Unless you don't have to worry about the power usage I'd go for more modern kit.

Might be fine for a lab server but no way I'd want to use one in the datacentre as the power costs will be horrible.

I actually got a T5500 from these guys to, more so for playing around but they've got a decent deal up here
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-T5500-Hex-Core-Intel-Xeon-E5645-2-4GHz-48GB-DDR3-Workstation-Barebones-PC-/401122326236?rd=1

I've got 8 of these (much more ram, and much better processors though) and they aren't as loud as people would have you think, especially not the g7's, they make me a tidy sum :stuck_out_tongue:

i have 2 of these and i dont think they are that bad. i would look at your energy Renewal :smile:

Having been there and done that many times now I can say it's never worth buying older hardware like this. Ever. Over the course of a year or two it's probably cheaper to rent a server / VM of better spec. Cold.

If you're going to be using Oracle then I would probably steer away from using Windows at all for the server(s) you setup, Linux is much much better. At work we use Red Hat Enterprise which you can get free licences for, or, if you can't get a free copy, CentOs is pretty much the same but completely free.

Oracle also do their own virtualisation product called VirtualBox but, afaik, it has to sit on top of an OS rather than a bare metal install. Could be useful for building some workstation VM's on a suitably big PC or laptop.

https://www.virtualbox.org/