$2395.00 a month for starters... but who would need more than *one quad core.. they offer 2xquad *32GB of ram?! Talk about overkill.... does DP even come close to using that much?? *6 146GB drives... a little bit over the half terabyte mark at 15K rpms.. overkill when you could just get a 500GB or 750GB drive at 15K rpms..?
I can top that with my 2 (soon to be three) antispam servers. They're quad Xeons with 192 gigs of memory in each. I don't want to remember what they cost me.
What I would *really* like is this rig: http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/pedge_m1000e/pd.aspx?refid=pedge_m1000e&s=biz&cs=555 Along with 8 full-height blades... of course, as I would want them configured, it would be ~$40,000 PER BLADE (192GB RAM, 24 core CPU power [4 physical x 6 core per CPU], etc. in each blade).
I started out with Dells (Still have them in an upstairs bedroom actually in a self built quarter rack running SETI@Home) went I went from leasing to purchasing the hardware but didn't care for them. The hardware was fine but the near daily phone calls from the sales staff was too much. I still get a call or two a month from them. I paid like $14k a piece for the two servers. Have Apple XServes 14TBs as backups. The first one was $15k with like a $900 annual service contract. The other four I got off ebay for a lot less.
It was my first attempt with managing server hardware. I bought the service contract. The repair techs operated on a callback basis. I learned though. Now with my currently supplier, I get 90 days warrentied and do my own work afterwards.
I do have to say that the one time I had a hardware issue with the existing blade servers, Dell was on top of it. A circuit board that manages the power controls (for the individual blades as well as the master power for the chassis) died one night at like 11pm, by 11:30pm they had a tech on the road driving from Los Angeles (the closest warehouse) with the part. By 1:30 am, it was back online. And... on top of it, it was out of warranty, with no active service agreement, so everything they did they were under no obligation to do.
I'm here in Charlotte and with all the banks here, they have reps in the city. It's like Xerox though. (I ran a Kinko's for nine months about 10 years ago.) You call a central number and their techs drive from one client to another in their mini vans filled with parts. The order they get to you depends on the seriousness of the problem and what level service plan you have. My ex was an assistant manager at a local Sleep Inn for awhile and she would always complain that for them, it was always over a 24 hours turn around. They were at the bottom of the totem poll though. With the datacenter being central in the city, it's just a matter of hopping a bus and getting there. Only real major issue I see is when a hard drive dies without notice and that's more time consuming than anything. I just stack parts in an unused section of one of the racks with more at a secure storage center. The datacenter I'm in requires support peer agreements between clients so almost always someone is on hand although hardware issues have to be handled by the owning company of the box. Had to reboot a Time Warner server a few days ago. Sure tempted on that to have some fun... The Xserves come out of Atlanta. Haven't had an issue yet on those but I'll pay the contract since I don't have decent access to them. We have an Apple store here in the city but they carry very few server parts. They do have two techs though who are server trained and I;ve bounced questions off of them previously. Not sure what we'll do on those when they EOL in 2 years. Kind of like them.
Overkill? no way. That's an awesome system. I've been dieing to upgrade to a core i5/i7 so I can get these massive amounds of DDR3 RAM in my system. I run a lot of virtual machines for development and testing purposes, and it seems like I'm running out of RAM all the time (currently have 4 gigs). Whoa. Had no idea Dell was that good about tech support, especially off the warranty.
It's not as much of an overkill as you think. It's more money not well spent then overkill. Those specifications are not really that high end. Popular site and PHP usage could be very high The more ram the better more caching going on. There are sites that will require a ton of memory. It's not about the space it's about the i/o. Those 6 drives in a raid-10 configuration will be much faster than a 500GB single drive plus there is no redundancy on just a single drive. So the configuration is not as overkill as you think. I would though if I had a vbulletin forum that popular I'd separate my services. So I'd have machine for the web serving one for the mysql. Or even multiples of that so one master mysql and a bunch of slaves. Then multiple web servers with a load balancer.