
DIY wins, when it comes to hardware
The longer I have to read these hardware offers, the more I want to take out my screwdriver and build those servers myself. Why should I leave the self-made server to Google?
I once made a calculation where I found I can build a 16 core Xeon E5-2670/256GB memory/2TB SSD/20TB HD server myself for £10K - delivery and labour included.
Let's assume one of these manufactured servers cost £300K after one year - that's including hardware, external maintenance contract, delivery and installation, license fees, SAN etc., and let me tell you £300K is a conservative estimate, you can easily pay £2million.
For £300K I can build 30 servers - that's 480 cores, 960 threads, 7.5TB memory, 60TB SSD, 600 TB storage in total, and I haven't mentioned memory and CPU overallocation yet, but I need to include clustering and hot sites.
Can any of these premium hardware manufacturers give me the above processing and storage power, duplication and high availability for £300K?
I have to pay for monitoring tools, virtualization and Linux or Windows, databases, etc. in the VMs either way. This leaves the hardware maintenance. What if something breaks?
Well, I take out my screwdriver and replace the broken part. That is me, or my colleague, and we do it on the spot and we don't need to wait for some "home call" or an engineer callout. And we go onto the open market to get the best deal and don't need a vendor specific replacement. And I can shred the part to make sure no sensitive data gets taken away. There shouldn't be a loss in availability, as the reduced costs for the hardware allowed me to design the system with resilience and duplication in mind, and I've freed myself from a vendor lock-in and increased security.
Why should I leave the self-made server to Google?