So you are a startup. You have decided to not use the cloudy stuff. You want some rocking hardware! Here it is.
Start with the chassis: The awesome Supermicro 2026TT. This badass in a 2U case has 4 nodes and can handle 24 2.5″ HDD’s. Each hot-swappable node has 2 sockets for Xeon processors 5600/5500, up to 196 Gig of ECC Ram and onboard LSI SAS 6g card to handle the max of six hot-swap drives.
Blades? We don’t need no … Who has the money for blades? This is an excellent startup box. Cost? For each node I configured: 48 G of ECC/REG RAM, 2 X 600G seagate HDD (to be added to later), 2X XEON E5620. I bought 2 of these servers for a total of 8 nodes. plus 2 extra drives for one of the boxes. $31,000 before tax. $31K for 8 rockin servers with 48G of RAM. This was on 12/2010.
Oh, and the redundant hot swap power supply consumes a max of 1400 watts which is 350 watts per server. Very low power for such beefy boxes. After 6 months of operation these supermicro boxes have been flawless. Still running CENTOS 5.
Hot swap node