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chuckula
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Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Thu May 31, 2012 5:06 pm

I'm toying with the idea of getting a small server for my office to replace the (not so reliable) third-party email provider we use. The performance of the server does not need to be particularly high, but I do want it to be reliable and preferably have a rack-mount option (either a rack-mountable tower or actual rack-specific case would be fine). I'd like it to have a minimum of 4GB of RAM, preferably 8, and a pair of 2 TB hard drives in a RAID 1. Also, if there is a cheap bare-bones setup that I can populate with RAM & HDD for less than the ripoff prices that Dell etc. charge, that would be fine too.

Note that I'm mostly price conscious here, which is why I'm asking about AMD, but a price-appropriate Intel solution would be fine.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a good single-socket server that is less than $1K that meets these requirements? I'd like a quad-core CPU if possible, but dual core could work in a pinch. I'd actually prefer the older Phenom II / Opterons, but I'll take a bulldozer variant if it is cheap enough. Does anybody have a good recommendation that meets these requirements or am I asking for too much (I am according to Dell & HP's websites).

Here's the best I've done so far, but it's $1,042 with the cheapest hard drive I could specify (I'd love it if they'd let me get the $#$@! thing without any hard drives at all):
http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i36463/ ... ron-1U.php

The refurbished server route might work too:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6859155026

Only $279. I'd replace the existing drives with larger hard drives and still come in at a reasonable price...
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Steel
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:40 am

If you want reliable, going with a refurb may not be the best option. Dell sells their new models for pretty cheap anyways: PowerEdge 210, PowerEdge 310.

You could also go the build your own route but then you'd be on the hook if anything went wrong.

Going hosted with a VPS may be an option too; I don't know how much your mail provider is charging you but running your own cloud VM may be comparable in cost and you'd have more control.
 
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:50 am

How big is your office? Be careful about sacrificing cheap for reliability, an outage can cost the company several thousands of dollars and quickly eat up any savings made. What do you plan to run for email on it?
 
thegst
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:04 am

disclaimer: i work for one of these types of service provider.

the no-bs parts of our advertising actually correctly point out, as long as you're staying Microsoft, that hosted TCO is much less.
if you're planning on rolling your own small email server I certainly commend you on your guts...but it has to be done right.
Done wrong, someone compromises you and uses your server as an open relay and your IP gets blacklisted everywhere with email bouncing. A good provider has methods to deal with security and maintaining netblock reputation. If you go MS you are also looking at licensing costs, whereas with OSS you may find that getting all the parts to work together requires a lot of tweaking and attention. Getting Postfix to talk to AmavisD and SpamAssassin/etc isn't always easy.

If it is super crucial to get mail to get where it's going, try hosting with Google Apps. It's our prime competitor, but probably great for the needs of a small office and is very reliable. I especially like the efficacy of the Postini FE.
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chuckula
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:20 am

thegst wrote:
disclaimer: i work for one of these types of service provider.

the no-bs parts of our advertising actually correctly point out, as long as you're staying Microsoft, that hosted TCO is much less.
if you're planning on rolling your own small email server I certainly commend you on your guts...but it has to be done right.
Done wrong, someone compromises you and uses your server as an open relay and your IP gets blacklisted everywhere with email bouncing. A good provider has methods to deal with security and maintaining netblock reputation. If you go MS you are also looking at licensing costs, whereas with OSS you may find that getting all the parts to work together requires a lot of tweaking and attention. Getting Postfix to talk to AmavisD and SpamAssassin/etc isn't always easy.

If it is super crucial to get mail to get where it's going, try hosting with Google Apps. It's our prime competitor, but probably great for the needs of a small office and is very reliable. I especially like the efficacy of the Postini FE.


Good catch, we are actually using a service provider that is re-selling us corporate Gmail right now! I'm actually looking at Zimbra (either in-house or managed) because I've heard good things about it and I like that it is more open than Gmail. Our biggest problem has been that our service provider requires us to login to Gmail through their own proxy server... and that @#$%@ proxy tends to go down every 6 weeks or so for no good reason even though Gmail itself still works. Since our contract is going to be ending in a few months, I'm exploring other options. Part of this exercise is to use in a negotiation with our current service provider if we choose not to ditch them entirely. More seriously though, I'm now leaning towards using Rackspace for managed Zimbra email because they offer a pretty competitive setup for only $2/seat/month which is a good bit cheaper even than Google apps. Rackspace also has solid reputation and I can point the finger at them if things hit the fan too.

I'm pretty experienced in IT in general. I was going to put Zimbra on the server on the software side (all Linux, I'd ditch MS on the desktop if Office was reliable enough in Wine). As for reliability, you are right that this is a key feature, which is why I'll likely go with a managed provider. To put things in perspective, I have a 6 year old laptop that I recycled from school for running our VPN... and the laptop just passed one year of uninterrupted uptime. Sometimes I think that the actual reliability of things is inversely proportional to how reliable you'd think they would be :-P
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thegst
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:59 am

I'M TRYING TO TALK HIM OUT OF A SERVER YOU GUYS

AM I A BAD GEEK
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 11:53 am

thegst wrote:
I'M TRYING TO TALK HIM OUT OF A SERVER YOU GUYS

AM I A BAD GEEK


If a server in-house does not fit his business's needs, no. There are several cases where hosted off-site is better, particularly from a cost point of view.
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 1:39 pm

Yeah, a managed provider is probably your best bet.

If you do decide to go the DIY route with an AMD CPU, use ECC RAM (and a motherboard that supports it... Asus' AMD motherboards are among the few desktop mobos that actually support ECC), RAID-1 the disks, make sure you have a good backup and disaster recovery plan in place, and get a UPS for the server.
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AbRASiON

Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Sat Jun 02, 2012 5:14 pm

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=HP%2 ... l=en&meta=
Amazing piece of hardware, so cheap and so useful. There's been a buying frenzy on them for 6 months here in Australia. I have 3 of them - many of my friends have one.

Great machine.
And yes, do outsource the mail component - bugger running that in house.
 
chuckula
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:11 am

AbRASiON wrote:
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=HP%20MICROSERVER&hl=en&meta=
Amazing piece of hardware, so cheap and so useful. There's been a buying frenzy on them for 6 months here in Australia. I have 3 of them - many of my friends have one.

Great machine.
And yes, do outsource the mail component - bugger running that in house.



That does look like a good deal. With some extra RAM and a pair of 2 TB drives it would still be less than $1K. I'm not going to setup an extra server for email, but that thing could come in handy for some online-backups and other data storage if the need arises.
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mduncan62
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:33 am

you should really just look into Microsoft Office 365. We have 400 users on it, and it's been flawless. Not sure what email server you're planning on hosting on your "workstation" server, but IMO if you are going to do it, you should do it right.
 
chuckula
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:44 am

mduncan62 wrote:
you should really just look into Microsoft Office 365. We have 400 users on it, and it's been flawless. Not sure what email server you're planning on hosting on your "workstation" server, but IMO if you are going to do it, you should do it right.



I'm kind of like Obi Wan Kenobe in Mos Eisley: I want to avoid any imperial Microsoft entanglements when I'm dealing with my data services. We don't use Exchange here (and I'm happy about that) and if there was a better alternative to Office I'd ditch it in a second too.
4770K @ 4.7 GHz; 32GB DDR3-2133; Officially RX-560... that's right AMD you shills!; 512GB 840 Pro (2x); Fractal Define XL-R2; NZXT Kraken-X60
--Many thanks to the TR Forum for advice in getting it built.
 
Beelzebubba9
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 12:01 pm

As someone who used to work for a Managed Service Provider and now manages the Exchange infrastructure of a mid-sized company, I highly recommend against bringing your email system in house. Unless your time is close to free, you likely won't save money by building our an email server in house, and if anything goes terribly wrong, you'll be stuck handling a screaming company full of people who can't get their email. Which is not fun.

I know I'm not saying anything that didn't occur to you, but my general rule of thumb was unless a company has some powerful regulatory reason to not use hosted email *or* can afford a full time employee to be on hand to deal with email issues 24/7/365 then hosted email (especially Exchange) is the better option.
 
chuckula
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:34 pm

Beelzebubba9 wrote:
As someone who used to work for a Managed Service Provider and now manages the Exchange infrastructure of a mid-sized company, I highly recommend against bringing your email system in house. Unless your time is close to free, you likely won't save money by building our an email server in house, and if anything goes terribly wrong, you'll be stuck handling a screaming company full of people who can't get their email. Which is not fun.

I know I'm not saying anything that didn't occur to you, but my general rule of thumb was unless a company has some powerful regulatory reason to not use hosted email *or* can afford a full time employee to be on hand to deal with email issues 24/7/365 then hosted email (especially Exchange) is the better option.


I agree at this point after looking at the options out there. We are already using hosted corporate Gmail, and my biggest issue with it is that it is through a middleman that isn't doing a good job when I could just be dealing with Google directly. I'm still leery about hosted Exchange, but we do have Outlook users here in the office and it might be nice to give them more features than just IMAP email too.
4770K @ 4.7 GHz; 32GB DDR3-2133; Officially RX-560... that's right AMD you shills!; 512GB 840 Pro (2x); Fractal Define XL-R2; NZXT Kraken-X60
--Many thanks to the TR Forum for advice in getting it built.
 
thegst
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 2:20 pm

mduncan62 wrote:
you should really just look into Microsoft Office 365. We have 400 users on it, and it's been flawless. Not sure what email server you're planning on hosting on your "workstation" server, but IMO if you are going to do it, you should do it right.


No, no, no. No one that knows anything about hosting recommends 365. We resell it for people that HAVE to have it and I know it well. It sucks. The management is awful and the recipient policy weird and draconian.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 6ee469e407

"The way it has been explained to me in numerous conversations with Pre-Sales and Support is that if you address 3 mail messages to 500 recipients each (500 is the limit per email with Office 365), you would be locked out of sending mail for 24 hours. It is a running count of "recipients", and not necessarily different recipients, that get's counted in a rolling 24 hour period.

If I sent an email to 10 people, then someone in that group responds to all, and I in turn respond to all again, my count would be at 20. In this situation every time I respond to all, my count would increment by 10. It seems ridiculous to lure businesses to use the hosted Exchange offered in Office 365 and bury this little known fact. According to support and Pre-Sales, once you reach your limit, there is NOTHING that can be done to extend it; you're stuck for 24 hours... This also applies to ALL messages, whether internal or external."

To clarify, this is per-user, but I still can't rec Office 365.
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mduncan62
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:30 pm

thegst wrote:
mduncan62 wrote:
you should really just look into Microsoft Office 365. We have 400 users on it, and it's been flawless. Not sure what email server you're planning on hosting on your "workstation" server, but IMO if you are going to do it, you should do it right.


No, no, no. No one that knows anything about hosting recommends 365. We resell it for people that HAVE to have it and I know it well. It sucks. The management is awful and the recipient policy weird and draconian.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 6ee469e407

To clarify, this is per-user, but I still can't rec Office 365.


Again, we've had 400 users on MS for 2 years with 0 issues. Never had a problem with daily message limits, and this is an insurance company. I would recommend it, I'd recommend not using a knock-off group that's jacking the price up to make a couple bucks. Just get it from the Microsoft and move on. If you plan on spamming thousands of recipients all day long, use a service to do it.
 
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:59 pm

I have a HP Proliant Microserver. Great little box and you can stuff 4x 3.5" disks and 4x 2.5" disks if you forgo optical. That's the config I am running right now. 8GB RAM, 4x 2TB disks RAID 5, 2x750GB disks RAID1 and 2x 320GB disks RAID1 for the OS (ESXi)

The server including the add on RAID card, memory upgrade came to just over $600. It's quiet shoebox sized box running headless on my bookshelf. Great little server.
 
Scrotos
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:51 pm

Here's some refurbs: http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=SVR

I picked up 2 for our office as extra servers. The configs we have are 2 quad-core CPUs, redundant power supplies, and a controller that can do RAID 5. Not bad! Gotta get some rails and more hard drives and it's "old", but I'm sure the manufacturer will sell us a service plan if we really care.

The "toy" server I got from these guys is actually about as powerful as our Exchange 2010 server, CPU-wise. 'bout the only thing different is I'd have to jack around to get RAID 6 (memory upgrade from 256MB to 512MB) on the ones I just got.

I'm undecided on the whole in-house versus external email thing. Yeah, if email breaks, it's your fault and your coworkers scream at you. But, honestly, if you're in IT and email breaks and it's externally hosted, you still get screamed at by proxy. It's not like that's a magical "oh it's ok, nevermind, we're cool" kind of situation. Stuff's broken and you're IT and you're expected to be doing something proactive to fix it.

Once we got our email setup in place, we haven't really messed with much. Exchange, nuthin'. We run a secure email/spam box in front of it called Mail Gate by Axway. It's nice enough. And for backup email "in the clouuuuud" in case we go down, we use Dell EMS. It works seamlessly with some Outlook plugins whenever there's a simulated outage and offers webmail as well for remote access in an outage.

About the only thing we do for day-to-day stuff is help end-user recipients with the whole "click here to log in and access this secure message" concept and to make sure that stuff that gets stuck in obscenity filters go through when they are valid. And heck, we get email notification when that stuff hits the filter so it's pretty easy. One guy is email obsessed and will try to make some regex rules for specific spam emails, but you don't have to go that route if you don't want to.

That being said, I got a buddy who hosts a domain for me on a RHEL server and recently migrated from SquirrelMail to Zimbra. From what I've seen so far, it is very very nice. I don't really use any of the features beyond just the email, but it seems pretty full-featured.
 
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:57 pm

BTW, normally we'd go through CDW or SHI or Zones or someone like that to build a proper server. Last one I did ended up something shy of 6 grand, I think? Server for $2500 and the rest was hard drives and other junk that I already forget. I was camping out on geeks.com checking their Mac inventory to get a G5 (inventory changes daily and throughout the day) when I noticed they had a server section. Since we were thinking of getting some more servers just to run the free version of VMWare, well... seemed like a good deal.

Just wanted to clarify in case anyone thought our business typically used, well, used stuff to save a buck. This was not a normal purchase methodology and since the OP was very price-sensitive, thought it was worth mentionin'.
 
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:20 pm

chuckula wrote:
I'm actually looking at Zimbra (either in-house or managed) because I've heard good things about it and I like that it is more open than Gmail.


I admin a Zimbra box at work, and it's really nice. It integrates everything very well, and it's gaining more industry support as it goes. I would definately spring for Network licenses and ActiveSync support.

There are a couple deficiencies.
1) It doesn't have a good offline client besides Outlook. There is Zimbra Desktop, but it's getting deprecated and it has all the deficiencies the web client has.
2) The axed the IM portion, and haven't got the webclient setup to login to external servers.
3) No official support for high availability. This stings since everything else has it. There are some hacky things you can do to approximate this, but they're unsupported. Basically, plan on a cold server and restoring from backup in the event of a crash.
4) Since they were acquired by VMware, the roadmap has been in influx and they've been really quiet about everything.
5) It's supported on RHEL best, and CentOS is unsupported. This makes sense if you're going to buy a Network Edition license.
6) Zimbra wants to be the only thing on the server. It doesn't like to share.

You could also look at Zarafa. It's equivalent to Zimbra and looks interesting.
 
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Tue Jun 05, 2012 4:07 am

mduncan62 wrote:
thegst wrote:
mduncan62 wrote:
you should really just look into Microsoft Office 365. We have 400 users on it, and it's been flawless. Not sure what email server you're planning on hosting on your "workstation" server, but IMO if you are going to do it, you should do it right.


No, no, no. No one that knows anything about hosting recommends 365. We resell it for people that HAVE to have it and I know it well. It sucks. The management is awful and the recipient policy weird and draconian.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 6ee469e407

To clarify, this is per-user, but I still can't rec Office 365.


Again, we've had 400 users on MS for 2 years with 0 issues. Never had a problem with daily message limits, and this is an insurance company. I would recommend it, I'd recommend not using a knock-off group that's jacking the price up to make a couple bucks. Just get it from the Microsoft and move on. If you plan on spamming thousands of recipients all day long, use a service to do it.


Please very carefully read the supplied link. This is a problem for many Office 365 users that do not spam thousands of recipients but have very normal usage patterns. We're not exactly a knock-off group either, but a Gold partner and the first to market with both hosted Exchange 2007 and 2010. Office 365 is provided for the customers that absolutely demand it, the take rate is abysmally low and the support costs and complaints are higher than our other products.

Here it is again, from MS themselves. http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/ff381292.aspx Do you really think this isn't a problem for a lot of potential email users? Most of the end users I know do not know how to make a distro list, for example. If you don't have extensive experience with a hosted product and don't know the ins and outs don't rec it.
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mduncan62
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Tue Jun 05, 2012 8:41 am

We have 50 Distro lists, just not that difficult, and counts for one. I like to cut out the middle man and go to the source, gold partner or not. I worked for just such a middle man. They used zenith for monitoring workstations, and sold hosted exchange. In some companies, it was more of a disservice to the client, then a service, but the almighty dollar makes it OK. We have a couple offices that we can't directly support, and have a 3rd party group that we constantly have to watch as they'll work on a Outlook problem for 6 hours, even though they could have just reimaged the computer and been done in 2. The lack of integrity, is what bothers me. Not saying your company is that way.
 
thegst
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Re: Cheap AMD server for email, light office stuff etc.?

Tue Jun 05, 2012 8:57 am

mduncan62 wrote:
We have 50 Distro lists, just not that difficult, and counts for one. I like to cut out the middle man and go to the source, gold partner or not. I worked for just such a middle man. They used zenith for monitoring workstations, and sold hosted exchange. In some companies, it was more of a disservice to the client, then a service, but the almighty dollar makes it OK. We have a couple offices that we can't directly support, and have a 3rd party group that we constantly have to watch as they'll work on a Outlook problem for 6 hours, even though they could have just reimaged the computer and been done in 2. The lack of integrity, is what bothers me. Not saying your company is that way.


Fair enough. I'm just saying from personal experience, 365 is bad in other ways that I have personally seen, and I'd love to save someone from some of the support ordeals I've been through. Better stated? And hell, technically I got training on the product ;)
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