Best hardware vendors for de novo genome assembly?

[roblanf]

Hi All,

Following on from a recent post last year, I'm writing to ask about people's experiences/recommendations with buying and using hardware from different companies.

The previous post concluded that to assemble 1GB genomes and do some transcriptome assembly, you might want something like this (assuming you could afford it)

4 x 8 core intel processors
512GB RAM
15TB hard drive space with fast i/o

If we take that setup as a given, my question is where would you buy it and why?

Some obvious options are:

Dell
HP
Supermicro

But I'd be interested to hear people's experiences, and any other information like reliability, price, other companies, or totally different solutions. (Bearing in mind that server maintenance can be a large and ongoing cost...)

It might help if people make clear what country they are talking about when discussing pricing.

Cheers,

Rob

[GenoMax]

Rob: Pricing works very differently in different parts of the world. In many locations (e.g. Europe there is a significant amount of VAT included when prices are quoted) where as in the US tax is generally not included in quotes (in addition state/federal academic/government institutions are tax exempt and may already have contract pricing in place with large vendors that is group specific and not available outside the group). In short it would be impractical to directly compare pricing as quoted in different parts of the world.

What you should be considering is information about local support (even within your institution, since there may be a favored vendor based on preexisting contracts/relationships) for a specific (or a group of) vendor(s). The kind of track record the vendor has for supporting the hardware and responsiveness of that support.

Most hardware is a commodity and the price difference may ultimately be because of the kind/length/extent of support that is being included in the quote. In the US we have the option of including extended hardware support in the initial cost of the hardware (which is sometimes convenient since that ensures long term stability). If you choose to go that route there will be no surprises down the road for the usable life of the hardware (generally ~6 years with large vendors).

[roblanf]

@GenoMax. Thanks for the reply - very helpful.