$299 servers

If you're in the server market, Dell.com is selling 600SC's for $299 ($399 less $100 mail in rebate) plus free shipping. That's for a 1.8Ghz Celeron with 128mgs and 40Gig HD. Take their basic support package to get this pricing.

I just bought 4.

[MathGuy]

Glenn, forgive my ignorance*, but what is it exactly that makes a server a server? My only experience with the way IT/IS people work is that they overspend for everything, but $299 does seem like a very good deal. I tried to configure a similarly equipped Dell Dimension (Home) PC, and could only get the price down to $463. Let's say for argument's sake that your server costs $500 versus $400 for a similar home PC; why would one choose the server over the PC?

* I'm not completely ignorant. I know what RAID is, but I noted that it's not included with the $299 jobber. Also, I like how they always throw around the word "scalable" which is just techno-speak for "upgradeable", right?

Scalable means "costs another $100". When was the last time you saw IT upgrade a computer vs buy a new one? Maybe more memory, but that's it.

High end servers have a lot of differences, but on low end ones like this it's small things like bus speed, faster hard drives (10K rpm instead of 5400 or 7200 that are in desktops), memory that's either a bit faster or a bit less error prone. I also expect that the fans and power supply are a bit more heavy duty than in a regular desktop. I don't see any reason why you couldn't run this as a desktop though.

[tan]Speaking of raid, my tech tells me that software raid is actually faster than hardware raid - and that software raid is now standard in Mandrake linux. So when we move to the new data center, I'll be kicking in a couple of IDE hard drives for a raid 0 to speed things up. That's good news, save the cost of raid controllers.[/tan]