[Raion]

Hello folks,

So currently IRIX Network runs three VPS servers and one dedicated server. The costs are roughly $94/mo, and there's compounding costs from domains, DDOS protection etc. that are not charged on a monthly basis. 

I am considering rolling some of these boxes into one or more colocated servers. At least one of them would go to Lenoir, NC which is a DC within driving distance. Another would probably either go to Florida or somewhere on the west coast. Colocation costs aren't terrible, but there's expense and risk involved.

So I'm asking the community and the other staff if they think it's the right time to consolidate some of our services. This will likely reduce our fault tolerance, but on the bright side I can switch at least some of our  servers to all-SSDs which should improve reliability and performance. The up-front costs would be paid by me and the savings would, until the servers were paid off, come out of the donations and other methods I have of monetizing the site. 

The second question I have is if anyone has any recommendations for a cheapish, Ivy or Haswell-era server I can look into. In particular, I need:

2.5 in SATA/HDD bays, at least 4, if not 6 or 8
1U 
Intel Network card (not realtek or atheros)
JBOD-compatible RAID controller

Any suggestions there as well?

The main reason I'm considering all of this is in the interest of cost reduction over the long term.

[jan-jaap]

The second question I have is if anyone has any recommendations for a cheapish, Ivy or Haswell-era server I can look into. In particular, I need:

2.5 in SATA/HDD bays, at least 4, if not 6 or 8
1U 
Intel Network card (not realtek or atheros)
JBOD-compatible RAID controller

Any suggestions there as well?

I guess you want ZFS? The LSI 9200 and 9300 series are very popular among the ZFS crowd because it's easy to flash them to IT mode and turn them into many-port SAS/SATA HBAs. The 9300 series are 12Gb/s and run slightly hotter than the 9200 series. I used to have another HBA with a Marvell chip and can't recommend it, too many small issues. The LSI cards are solid.

I've been supper happy with my own server, which uses a Supermicro XL1SLH-F mainboard and a Haswell Xeon. Mine is 2U (12 bays), so I installed an LSI 9200 series controller with IT firmware. Alternatively there's the Supermicro X10SL7-F. It has the LSI chip on the mainboard already.

Only downside I can think of is the 32GB max RAM capacity. If you wanted to run this as an ESX platform you with more than a few VMs you probably want more RAM. I do not use a hypervisor.

[Raion]

I need a 1U so I can take advantage of the cheap Colo fees. Their pricing is exponentially worse for a 2+U.

That all being said, yeah it's probably gonna be illumos or FreeBSD for the host.