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Comment by 10000truths | Hacker News Reader

$225K for this sounds bonkers:

  24x 6.4TB Intel P4610 NVMe SSD = 24 x $310 = $7440
  2x AMD EPYC 7542 = 2 x $1300 = $2600
  2 TB DDR4 ECC RAM ~ $13700 (estimate from a couple of Google results)

Those add up to something like $25K. Sure, there's also the price of the motherboard, chassis, maybe some other peripherals like external network cards, assembly + support + warranty etc. but that doesn't explain an 800% markup.

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We recently purchased a similar server.

One thing to note is that a VAR (as mentioned elsewhere) will knock 75% off the price listed on Dell’s website.

Another this is that that is way too cheap for those SSDs. Enterprise SAS (not plain SATA) SSDs are a lot more than $310. Our 7.68TB drives are about $2k each, but worth it if they stay problem free.

Even on Newegg, SAS SSD of that size are $900-2000, so add warranty and service on top of that.

> One thing to note is that a VAR (as mentioned elsewhere) will knock 75% off the price listed on Dell’s website.

Makes sense.

> Another this is that that is way too cheap for those SSDs. Enterprise SAS (not plain SATA) SSDs are a lot more than $310. Our 7.68TB drives are about $2k each, but worth it if they stay problem free.

I was able to find these two enterprise-grade NVMe SSDs on Newegg:

  https://www.newegg.com/p/2U3-0005-000J8 ($474, 7.68 TB, 1 DWPD)
  https://www.newegg.com/p/2U3-000S-000Y8 ($360, 6.4 TB, 3 DWPD)

Is there some kind of catch I'm missing?

I am not too much of an expert on enterprise hardware, but those are PCIe interface. I don’t know how possible it is to rack up 24 of those in a single server (you would run out of lanes).

This is something more similar to what is in those Dell servers (and there are 24 of them):

https://www.newegg.com/samsung-pm1643a-7-68tb/p/2U3-0005-000...

https://www.newegg.com/p/0N7-0133-00003

There is certainly a markup with Dell, but it’s sort of like a cloud vendor - pay for the warranty and service, and be (somewhat) hands off if something breaks.

> I don’t know how possible it is to rack up 24 of those in a single server

that's the one of points of article: Epic cpus have 128 lanes for a while, and that's how they upgraded to 24 NVMEs.

Oh yeah, the article. I guess this thread got sidetracked on the topic of Dell's pricing :). I wonder how common a 24-drive NVMe server is.

I don't know all the ins and outs of SAS vs NVMe. Maybe someone else can chime in. I am at the end of my knowledge now.

I suppose one benefit is the availability of hardware RAID controllers, as hinted in the article. But it does seem interesting that NVMe is cheaper than SAS, while theoretically having higher bandwidth.

Yeah, I feel SAS is obsolete tech, and will be replaced by NVMe everywhere going forward.

Threadripper and Epyc has been smashing the pcie lane limit for a while now. That's why Epyc is kicking intel's ass in server applications.

My personal workstation at the side of my desk has 6 pcie nvme ssd's and I can add 4 more without breaking the lane bank.

> > One thing to note is that a VAR (as mentioned elsewhere) will knock 75% off the price listed on Dell’s website.

> Makes sense.

Does it? Adding a middleman that needs to take a cut to exist reducing the price makes sense to you?

For a critical system, you should really have two, for HA purposes. Do they?

Yes. Let’s Encrypt has two locations, each of which has fully redundant hardware, so that’s a minimum of 4. We actually have a few more.

(I work at Let’s Encrypt)

The hardware may have cost more in 2021 when this article was written.

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