Bladewatch.com

http://www.bladewatch.com/servers/ or this ebay auction.

I have been discussing the state of the server estate for some years, writing a few guides introducing concepts like ILO, discussing virtualization best practices, and interviewing colleagues in the enterprise and SMB space, from the CIO looking to reduce his support costs, to the server guy trying to get that blade enclosure working for their next virtualization project. There are some common themes and common concerns throughout the SMB and enterprise space, both may want the same thing for different reasons, for the SMB their first server might be a two or three year old box ‘something reliable’, for the enterprise they might just need a part which their supplier hasn’t got in stock, or to act as the bridge between now and when they can migrate their application or services off that box, with that in mind, Bladewatch is beginning a service. It’s small to begin with, and we are not going to oversell ourselves or make promises that we can’t keep. It’s a network kind of thing, that is we’re not necessarily looking to make money through it directly, we’re aiming to solve problems first for our end readers.

We work with a few local small businesses and we also have a few resellers that we have worked with in the past, as part of this we managed to obtain some HP Proliant DL385 G1 servers. It is a great server, they aren’t new, but they are extremely reliable and based on AMD’s Opteron processor, with plenty of room for disk space, for memory expansion, an ideal server for running an application a web site, or your email platform, equally for testing VMware. We’ve recently just added them to ebay, but we’re doing it in a different way, a Bladewatch style.

So what differentiates us from any other ebay or reseller? Well we aren’t planning to sell in volume or necessarily live in this space, the aim of the game very much is to carefully make the right purchases when necessary in order to meet end user requirements, and as such, we’re offering some unique things.

Every server sold goes through the following:

• Upgrades to ensure it’s fit for purpose – simple things like a DVD drive, two power supplies, enough memory and disk space to get you started
• Diagnostics run and verified
• Operating system installed, driver pack loaded and online diagnostics and logs checked for errors
• System wiped and reset to factory default so it’s ready out of the box
• SmartStart and the PSP downloaded on CD ready again so you can plug in your Windows/VMware CD and press go
• Firmware upgraded to the latest version – System bios / Array / Network and iLO

We would love to hear your comments and suggestions on this, when we spoke to one CIO about the idea he said great, as long as you take amex and he then told us why:

“I’m in, we had a server die last month our support provider wanted £1000 for a system board or they offered an engineer on site for about half that plus parts, we said no and told our customer, sorry game over, and spent weeks migrating the application off. What neither realized was that we had the money but couldn’t economically pay that much, we would have paid for a server or the parts for say £300 or so, if had we known someone we could trust”.

That’s where hopefully Bladewatch as a site, as a community and a company can help, (with no hard sales), we’ll update the page for the servers we purchase every now and again, in the meantime if you are after anything, let us know and we’ll see what we can do to help, as we said, it’s about end user engagement and linking the dots, the more end users we help, the more people we on board to servers, the better for the community in terms of engagement and opportunity.

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