Since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, I can no longer buy my favourite Sun Fire X2200M2 Servers anymore… (and the replacement product is about 5X the price) I needed to look to a new manufacturer of servers:

• My hatred of Dell is long lived and well deserved, so they’re out. (Got to buy their drives, their IPMI/”DRAC” is terrible, any interaction is an hour long phone call…)
• Supermicro is a maybe… their IPMI is hit-or-miss, and it’s difficult for my supplier to source any of the parts.
• HP is possible, but you have to license their IPMI/LOM, and I think you’re locked into buying their drives too. Other than the old stuff, everyone seems to like them. But their website is terrible.
• IBM has one Opteron-based server, and it’s even more expensive than the Oracle – with half the guts.
• I don’t want to DIY… too hard to get the chassis + mobo + PCI Riser + HFS to all agree.

After a few days of very tedious and frustrating hunting, I gave up trying to find a G34-socketed Opteron server and expanded the criteria to include specific Xeon CPUs. In the end, I ordered an HP DL120 G6 for about $1250 – a nice promo deal that included 2x250GB drives and 2GB of RAM. Compare this to the Intel or SuperMicro kits, which were going to cost about $900 for the chassis, PSU and motherboard alone. (Add CPU, RAM, Disk and rack rails.)

It should arrive in the next few days, we’ll see how that goes… We already use HP Procurve networking gear at Server North Inc., so maybe we’re slowing going to go that way…?