Why Dell Servers? 1

[BoulderBum]

Pardon my ignorance, but what would be the advantage of, say, getting a Dell server with a single Xeon processor over, say, a "desktop" with an Athlon 64-FX with registered RAM?

I'm looking into building a website I hope to run from home, and was thinking of using a "desktop" computer such as the one described above as a first server. I'm a software guy, though, so I'm pretty dumb about all this hardware crap.

Why would I want a "server" system rather than the alternative?

 

[NickFerrar]

Very low end servers like the cheap IDE models Dell offer aren't much different from desktops, the differences are greater the more money you spend, such as:

- More redundancy (power supplies, hard drives, RAM)
- Hot-swap capabilities (disks, PCI cards etc)
- Bigger capacity power supplies
- You don't pay extra for a fancy graphics/sound card you don't need
- Can be rackmountable (important when you have a lot of servers to fit somewhere)
- Better warranty (24x7 cover etc)
- More R&D effort - I know Dell put a lot of effort into development and testing of new server models, including more intensive stress-testing than happens with desktops
- Better management features (temperature, fan, PSU sensors etc)

Probably quite a few other things to. Some of the above you could get with a desktop by paying extra, some you can't.

For something to run a website on at home a desktop should be fine, unless it's business-critical and a lot of revenue would be lost if it went down, in which case you'd be wise to pay extra for a proper server with redunancy features.

 

[BoulderBum]

That was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.