* I have (hopefully) one semester left. After that, I’m gone.
* A good portion of our experienced team will be gone within the next two years, including the few grad students who helped build our cluster. Introducing “non-supported” hardware would likely introduce problems for the next group.
* The prices above were from Dell, not self assembly shopping. University policies mandate any university funded tech/infrastructure equipment (especially desktops/servers) be done through specific partners. For us, that’s Dell, GovConnection, and CDW. I host my own 6 node Supermicro Microblade setup (render farm) from CDW that took almost a full year to purchase because nobody in the Purchasing Dept. for clubs was aware of that rule. Until my hopping from Boxx to Thinkmate to “haha, funny story...” uncovered it.
That is amazing. With those kind of prices folks might upgrade before their old hardware has properly aged out. At what point does AMD institute a buyback program for Intel hardware? (joking)
1, you are right, you can build your own machines for way less than dell
2, you are now the support team. So when you get a call months, years later about hardware quirks, missing pieces or odd incompatibilities, expect it.
3, Buy extras and keep the machines largely the same. The fleet will be its own spare parts as it ages out. You will need extras for differential testing.
4, Keep a log and copy of all the bioses supplied by the motherboard manufacturer. Baseline and benchmark each server before it is put into production, retest as it is cycled out for other duties.
5, If you don't max out the memory when built, do track ram prices and there is a sweet spot of a dip just as the ram tech ages out. If you miss it, ram prices go back up again. An older machine with lots of ram will useful for a very long time.
If one plans it right, 100 node HPC cluster decays into a 75 node render farm into a 25 node distributed system test cluster, I think they could get 10 years of service out of the purchase.