@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
Why is HPE giving away this much in equipment, but the specs don't seem realistic? Two blade servers, but only TWO hard drives (total)?!
Because they are blades. It's for high density compute needs, not storage. The drives are there for booting the blade, and really overkill for that as well because of SD cards. Once Vmware is booted, it's really low resource.
We don't even have a SAN where I work
Buy one then. $5K for a MSA1040, connect with fibre channel, throw in some SSDs for databases and cheap 'n deep SAS drives for everything else. Maybe $10K total outlay.
And 64GB of RAM (total)!? Per blade wouldn't be bad, but based on the spec list, it looks like it will be 32GB per blade.
RAM is cheap, like, super duper cheap. Throw another $1K per blade to beef up your memory a bit.
Real question is, what is your workload look like and will you need expansion of an additional 14 blades in the future? Can your datacenter handle the power requirements? Will adding this add any redundancy over your probable kludge of a server room?
If you can't use it, I'll take it off your hands. I have some nice PURE Storage arrays that would love to have a new friend.