[wplug] non dell system builders

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
> I'm helping to order some machines for some research here at CMU.  Dell 
> came back with a pretty outrageous quote, mainly because they don't have 
> a rackmount case that can fit the drives we'd like, so they need to sell 
> us an external storage enclosure, which really jacks up the price of the 
> systems.  Does anyone have good experience with any non-dell system 
> builders?  Ideally it would be someplace like what Monarch Computer used 
> to be, where you can go online, select your cpu, hard drives, raid, etc 
> and get a nice little web quote.

I figured I'd take the responses and summarize them here.  Maybe Google
will pick it up and provide options for some other people.  I've only 
included the options where I could easily get a nice little web quote to 
compare with.

I got a few recommendations from other people in academic environments.
  Thinkmate (http://www.thinkmate.com/) came up the most.  They have
reasonably priced, very slick, and configurable systems.  Most are built
using Lian-Li cases and can be either rack mounted or pedastal.  I'm a
big fan of their personal supercomputer, but I can't figure out how to
get the budget for that.

Silicon Mechanics (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) seemed to be a bit
cheaper than ThinkMate and their hardware is used by places like
LiveJournal and Microsoft Terra Server.

Also had good recommendations for Seneca Data
(http://www.senecadata.com/) Reason Computers (http://reasonco.com),
although I remember Reason back when they were Voyageur systems.  But
that's a long time ago.  It's amazing how issues of Computer User from
St Paul circa 1993 come back to your mind.

Penguin Computing (http://www.penguincomputing.com/) came up a few times 
from folks who had been generally satisfied with the quality of the 
systems.  They're a bit pricier and didn't offer quite the same up to 
date options of some of the other vendors.  Back in the day it was these 
guys vs VA Linux.  Now it seems like Linux system builders are dime a 
dozen.  Their systems were fairly pricey, but word on the street is that 
their support is quite good.

IronSystems (http://www.ironsystems.com/) seemed like it could be a very 
useful site if I was purchasing a large number of computers, but we're 
just looking for one here.  Once again, I couldn't manage to get a 
configuration that matched what I was finding from the vendors listed 
earlier.


In the end, it looks like the project is going to buy a system sans 
disks from a vendor and then order the disks with the 5 year 
manufacturer warranty.  CMU has an internal support department than can 
help keep the project going should something go dramatically wrong.  I 
think by looking at places other than Dell we've managed to save about 
$3000 off the cost of a $7800 server.  Not bad for a little work.

Thanks for the help everyone!

--Patrick