Possible Donation of Servers

A business colleague is interested in donating some computing equipment that I setup for them around 5 years ago. A lot of it is better than what DMS is running now for various things. Let me know if this is something worth pursuing for DMS. They’d need a letter acknowledging the donation. There are file servers, high density compute nodes (20 cores, 128GB or RAM if I recall correctly), 10Gb network adapters. Going off of memory but it’s in that ballpark. I think there are 20 compute nodes total. The timing would be in a month or two.

In my humble opinion we should accept the donation and upgrade some of the stuff we have and sell the rest. Not my call though. Pinging @Team_Infrastructure and ping others if you want. If the answer is yes, pursue it, then I’ll send an email to them and include someone at DMS in the email and y’all can work out the details. I’m happy to transport stuff.

5 Likes

We’ve been discussing purchasing some newer used gear so this is good timing I think to discuss. If it’s all 5 years old or newer that is a jump over our current systems.

Worst case we could auction/donate anything we didn’t use.

1 Like

If possible I would also be curious on having a list of model numbers/generation information before we dig too deeply

Not sure part numbers because it’s been too long. Xeon whatever would’ve been 2016-2017 time frame. They’re newer than most of what’s at DMS now.

IMHO we should accept the donation as it it very generous. We should upgrade what we can with it and if we have no need for it or the servers dispaced they can be auctioned off. Thanks @lukeiamyourfather for thinking of DMS.

I’m not on the @Team_Infrastructure committee but this sounds too good not to accept.

3 Likes

I think we would be interested in getting them. @Evan_Lott thoughts/can you okay that?

I agree that anything that we can’t/don’t end up needing can potentially go in a future round of auctions or donations or whatnot.

@lukeiamyourfather That rack looks like it’s all SMC gear

2x 4U 24 bay storage-rich (6048R)
5x 2U 12 bay general compute (6028R)

If they’re from the 2016-2017 timeframe, they’ll most likely be Intel Broadwell generation, and if the compute nodes are 20 core each, they’re most likely E5-2640 v4 machines.

They’ll all use expander backplanes, and are freaking workhorse machines. That said, given their age, I don’t know that it would make sense to sell whatever we don’t put into service: hang onto them for parts, particularly if they’re all identical.

1 Like

The 2U are fat twin or whatever SMC calls it. Four machines per 2U. The processor sounds right.

1 Like

Ooooohhhhhh.

So, that’s an interesting twist. I think those are the TwinPros - I’ve never used them, they don’t make sense in my world, but they’re an interesting box.

Some private messages were exchanged. This should happen in a month or two (donor’s timeline). I’ve let the donor know we’re interested and I’ve included the proper folks from DMS.

4 Likes