2nd hand servers...

[Dr. Z]

Alreet guys, I know all about eBay and servers, but this isn't for my personal use and so I need to be both a bit more discerning with spec and definitely price : performance as its not my money!

Basically, the brief is that I need to buy as many servers as I can for £800 but they must all be capable of running in a highish load environment. Talking about encoding streams for bandwidths upwards of 200mbit constantly, handling various other bespoke software and general stuff like web and mail servers.

I've arrived at a rough spec of a dual 3GHz Xeon 2U box with a couple of scsi drives of at least 36Gb with a reasonable raid controller and an absolute bare minimum of 2Gb RAM - these boxes will be running VMWare ESX.

Anyone know of some end-of-cycle stuff going at their places of employment?

[Burble]

I'll have a look when I'm in the office this afternoon but I think all our EOL kit has been sent off for recycling already.

[Daz]

If this is for business, wont you have a problem finding kit matching the ESX hardware compatibility list? Support can be a bit funny about that.

Our next lot of EOL stuff wont be until next year unfortunately.

[edit]Unless of course you're gonna use 3i (which is now free), in which case ignore the first comment :D

[Burble]

As I thought all our old crud is already gone. The only things I have left over are a few SPARC CPU's from an E450 but I think at least one of them is dead anyway.

[Dr. Z]

If this is for business, wont you have a problem finding kit matching the ESX hardware compatibility list? Support can be a bit funny about that.

Our next lot of EOL stuff wont be until next year unfortunately.

[edit]Unless of course you're gonna use 3i (which is now free), in which case ignore the first comment :D

Its for shock, I'm just sick of administering old, ailing bodged together desktop PCs.

Two servers running ESX (which the spec I am aiming at will run fine!) and some SAN with VMotion or similar is the way forward.