An 8TB 256-core server? You won't believe how 'cheap' these are

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This server has more RAM than most laptops have storage

(Image credit: hp)
HP BLc7000 G3 Blade Server Solution - £33,995 on eBay (roughly $35,000/AU$61,000)
£33,995 at eBay

HP BLc7000 G3 Blade Server Solution - £33,995 on eBay
(roughly $35,000/AU$61,000)
These second-hand 256-core server solutions aren't exactly cheap, but they're certainly much cheaper than the price when new. The combined memory reaches a whopping 8TB (roughly 1000x the amount found in a regular computer) and there's a three-year warranty to boot.

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When hyperscalers (cloud services like Google or Amazon) or web hosting companies (e.g. Bluehost or Inmotion hosting) decommission old servers, eBay is usually where they end up.

It so happens there are a few HP BLc7000 G3 Blade server solutions currently on sale there. At £33,995 (approximately $35,000/AU$61,000 excluding VAT), they don’t come cheap, but that’s only a fraction of the £300,000 they would have cost new.

You can barter with the vendor if you like and the kit ships worldwide (with free delivery to EU countries), with the exception of the Russian Federation.

Serious firepower

These servers have been used, but still carry a full three-year hardware warranty & remote support. There’s also a 10Gbit Flex-10 530M Dual Port NIC card installed to take advantage of the dual HP ProCurve 6120XG Blade switches and six 2.4KW power supply units.

The seller claims you can run up to 750 virtual machines on one server using any VM-based OS, such as like Vmware vSphere, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V. Bearing in mind the server's Sandy-Bridge Xeon chip is nearly seven years old, it's not a cutting edge product, but it'll be fine if you're not in need of the latest tech.

What do you get for your money? Well, for a start, it's a cluster of servers rather than a single unit; there’s 16 HP BL460c Gen8 with 256 cores (two Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors each with 16-Core and 32-threads) and 8TB of RAM. Yes, 8192GB of system memory (DDR3 ECC) - about 1000x the amount found in most laptops and desktop PCs.

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Desire Athow
Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.