Underappreciated 14-bay 2U storage server - HP DL180 G6 for $168 shipped

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dba

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Feb 20, 2012
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Their back...and at an even better price. $408 this time, but with only a single PSU instead of 2 (the 460w PSUs are available for $15 on ebay if you really want one).

At this price, assuming you really can sell the L5630s for $200 each, then you are getting the rest of the DL180 for $8. Seems like it might be a good deal :)

590636 001 HP Proliant DL180 G6 Server 1x L5630 Quad Core 2 13GHz 4GB RAM No HDD 008835859909 | eBay

(note: could be a mistaken listing. The title says 1x L5630, but the description in the body say 2x L5620).
I had to ask the question: The seller responded that these are single CPU machines.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I had to ask the question: The seller responded that these are single CPU machines.
Actually not terrible. Sell the P410 and the L5630 and buy 2x L5520's for $56. Still end up with a 4GB RAM dual CPU machine for around $180. Likely quieter than a Dell C1100 and has more storage capacity.
 

mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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I gotta say, HP boxes are tanks. I still rock the DL320s storage server which is 1 generation before (core2duo max 8gb ram) with a P410 or P812 and for D2D and file serving they are quite nice. I never have to think about these PMC controllers. The P400 LSI was a big turd (dl320s came with it).

Lefthand's are just these with ILO2 (enabled) on mobo with dedicated port, and dual intel nic's - SE1220 - nobody wants them because there is no general support
 

Patrick

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Similar what happened to me dba - Mine I got for $480 + tax and shipping was like $525. I really want those L5630 CPUs. May put L5520's in and sell the server off and hope I get $375 for it.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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No kidding. Makes me wonder how much lower I could have offered. Now I just have to wait for a good price on drive caddies.
Tip for buyers offering with Esiso (the seller in all of these links): ask for caddies in your offer. I bought one of these chassis about a week ago and got 14 caddies for about $25 as part of the package. At < $2 each they are not so bad of a deal.
 

nethel

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Jan 9, 2013
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Tip for buyers offering with Esiso (the seller in all of these links): ask for caddies in your offer. I bought one of these chassis about a week ago and got 14 caddies for about $25 as part of the package. At < $2 each they are not so bad of a deal.
I just sent Esiso a message about doing this. Seems they are not as generous with my offers on the drive caddies they have for sale.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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I just sent Esiso a message about doing this. Seems they are not as generous with my offers on the drive caddies they have for sale.
My guess is that they have several different people servicing their ebay offers and your experience may depend on who happens to respond...

Also, you can't just "send them a message" and expect a good response, especially if they already have a closed deal with you that you are trying to modify. Pick one of their systems on offer that looks attractively priced, close enough to what you are after for a final price that you would be willing to pay it. Send and ebay offer for MORE than they are asking (not less) but add a comment to the offer like "offer is for xyz system from listing including 14 3.5" drive carriers". Assuming you want two CPUs or redundant PSUs or the higher-power PSU you can gain a bit more price wiggle room for yourself...as in "offer is for xyz system from listing with 14 drive trays and adding a 2nd 460watt PSU". Doing this allows you to offer above their asking price but still ask them for an attractive deal.

You have to think in terms of how big resellers work. They often give their desk agents full authority to accept offers at (or above) ask - but they have to get permission to drop the price.

Besides - what is unspoken is this: for every "accepted" lowball offer that gets reported here there were probably dozens rejected. None of us brag about the failures. But the people who Shop Victoriously(tm) are the ones who keep on trying.

Worst case is they say no and then you move on to the next attempt.
 
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PigLover

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Also - this thread has over 1100 views. If Esiso happened to get a flood of lowball offers due to what was posted here they might be a bit less cooperative...at least for the next few days. Who knows - they might have stopped by and seen what has been posted and "found out" what is being suggested...
 

Biren78

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Jan 16, 2013
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Similar what happened to me dba - Mine I got for $480 + tax and shipping was like $525. I really want those L5630 CPUs. May put L5520's in and sell the server off and hope I get $375 for it.
maybe good deal. minorly more expensive than a c1100 but 14 drives and raid controller so worth it if you can save the space
 

nethel

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Jan 9, 2013
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PigLover said:
Also, you can't just "send them a message" and expect a good response
Worked out pretty well here. I referenced my recent purchase with them and ended up paying about $5 per caddy.
 

mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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Yeah i'm surprised nobody wanted a nice new 30" man. okay I guess i go scout some cpu's
 

Patrick

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Are you CPU hunting or DL180 hunting? I just bought one of those dual L5630 DL180s in order to get the chassis and I'm planning to sell the CPUs.
Jeff - we should have coordinated better. I think my DL180 G6 is going to go to mrkrad after I can get into the LO100 (and if he still needs.) If he doesn't want by the time I'm done I was going to stick in 2x L5520's and sell the unit.
 

mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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Cool man. I just hate buying used cpu's (I suspect you've given the machine a good whirl by now and not had any crashes). I've got a bunch of left hands that i'm turning into plain old servers.

If anyone wants to buy the lefthand's they are P4300 G2's with 8 450gb 15K SAS drives each, 4 total units. The warranty is almost up but not - so it can be extended for $2800 a year and includes 10 VSA (hyper-v/ESXi) licenses which allow you to setup virtual lefthand's say on Amazon or another website. You can then do cool stuff like N:1 and 1:N replication (2 Lefthands at site 1, and 2 lefthands at site 2 can replicate to 1 VSA at site 3, plus site 3 can replicate back to site 1 and 2). You can even do stretched ISCSI and network raid-5 or network raid 10+1 or 1+2 (synchronous writes to Site 1, site2, and site 3 for instance) with full SRM support. You can literally fail over with SRM the storage and/or hosts. Pretty high end.

I'd love to sell this to someone who would use it for what its meant for - the servers sell for about $48K new - They are SE1220 servers with code in the lefthand software to detect you are not running them on DL180's etc. The VSA's are bound to the MAC ADDRESS (basically registered to the manual mac addresses in esxi 5.1) - 10 - plus it has 99999 remaining re-allocations should you need to change the mac addresses on the 10 to every possible manual mac address that esxi supports ;) thought I can't imagine any reason why you'd ever do that unless you were really bored. You can only legally use 10 at a time. lol. I wonder if they would let you have 5 VSA's in cold-standby (not powered on) with the same mac addresses at another site like amazon should your world get taken away by a tornado and you need to stand up world somewhere else like amazon or your basement.

So i'm basically throwing out the software and using the machines as vm hardware. It's solid. But Someone who wanted a decent SAN with super high availability - probably realizes that 4 lefthands plus 10 vsa (bound by mac address of the manual esxi range) would be a bargain and support would be like $3000 a year thereafter (all san's have stupid expensive support fees).

So i'd be up for trades. The hardware is super solid and warranted. The software is super solid as well. It is 1000x better than any other ISCSI software , and bulletproof. It's quite amazing to watch an upgrade take out the servers in sequence and everything keeps running. The only thing i'd change is add some SSD caching and 10gb nic's ($100 each) and maybe throw in SSD's instead of the slow 15K SAS 450gb drives ;)


I figure I could get $10K easily for such a nice solution, but i'm just needed 4 servers. or some other solid storage solution like a P2000 G3 (i'm a simple man!) or a FCoE TOR switch or two.

The SE1220 is just a DL180 G6 with nicer nic's and ilo2 and super beefy fans that don't get quiet. It's wired a little different. It can be modified in front to expand to 12 drives instead of 8 LFF. Throw in 4TB RE4's and have monstrous ISCSI performance!

I figured I'd throw it out there. Someone might need enterprise storage at a budget price!

I'm just wanting Patrick's L5630's since these SE1220's only came with E5520's and my whole vmware is #5600 series cpu's