Procuring hardware the poor mans way .....

As a project manager in my 9-5 day job i see the different ways hardware is procured.

I see how hardware is procured when a company has a *preffered* service provider and uses this vendor for all hardware purchases regardless of the project and i also see how hardware is procured when the decision is made for selecting the *best* provider to supply hardware for a particular project.

Outsourcing was the way to go some years ago and possibly even now it is still the preffered method. It must be understood however that even outsoucing the management of infrastructure isnt as simple as saying to a hardware provider, here is my hardware go and support it !

There are many things that must be supplied to the vendor and there needs to be a certain amount of collaboration to succed in an out sourced model. When selecting the outsourced model, without correct management the kind of service you can end up with is a under par service, lots of finger pointing and millions of dollars worth of wasted money.

OK OK so what has this got to do with the garage datacenter you may ask ... Im getting to my point now .... :) so sorry for that little bit of a tangent ...

So here at the garage datacenter we procured hardware by looked at the kind of hardware we needed, the different channels we could get it through and the best possible savings we could achieve. We procured hardware and also bought backups incase of failure, this is mainly cause we are poor individuals and dont have millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to waste...

However, even though we saved alot of money on hardware, our datacenter has great equipment capable of running the system comfortably, all it takes is to purchase the right equipment, understand how to configure that equipment and maximize its throughput, takes bit of know how and abit of tweaking but the savings and the performances cant be beaten.

OK so lets take a look at how we procured hardware ... what did we do ?!?! Many of our hardware components where purchased as follows:

- Dell 2550's - Unverstiy of Technology Sydney throw away - Load balancers
- ML350's - Ebay - Application Servers
- ML370's - Ebay - Application Servers
- ML570's - Ebay - Storage Servers
- DL580's - Warehouse resellers - 4xDatabase Servers 2xFirewalls
- Racks - Ebay
- Switches - company seconds
- Dell p4 2ghz machines - Routers

Many of the challenges we had to overcome as a result of getting hardware at a really cheap, or almost free cost is as follows .... i guess time is money, but if you have some time and no money its better to spend time ;) ... So our issues that would waste our time:

- Damaged hardware - hard disks, missing back planes, memory modules, scsi cards
- Non standard hardware - Funny bolts and screws, different types of rails
- Non standard configurations that needed reverting - Funny pre-configured servers
- Getting components - Huge racks, heavy servers, lifting, mounting, racking
- Pickng up equipment

Myself and Datacenter Hitman had to pickup the racks ourselves and at times when it came to picking up some of the equipment we had to do it in the dead of night to avoid police detection. The reason for this was because some of the methods we used to bring back the equipment such as huge racks were less then what is regarded the *safe* way of doing things ;)

After all this heavy lifting though im glad to say our hardware is setup and completly configured from a hardware and systems software point of view. Along the way we also made very good friends with some of the people we dealt with and im sure in future these individeuals we met would be able to further assist us with out journey.

When i look back at the difficulties datacenter Hitman and I went through and what we have today , i sit back and think at whats more to come and the future ahead. Its been a great job and im proud (regardless of what happens) of the job data center hit man and I have done to get to this point.

For the next entry of this blog, i will add some comments of the additional team members who have joined our journey over the last few months ... this should complete the catchup posts and i should be able to post then from a day to day basis .....