Research-backed Configure to Order Server Design

Creating a server configuration that meets all your business needs, both now and in the future, comes down to four core factors: performance, price, reliability and device efficiency.  

At Techbuyer we work to provide you with the best possible solution across all four of these factors to support your business development through IT infrastructure.  

Price wise, our refurbished devices will maximise your IT budget; in terms of reliability, we ensure that your device is thoroughly tested and comes with a warranty.  With this testing process in place, your refurbished technology will perform as well as new. However, the work we do really gets interesting when we’re talking about performance and efficiency.  

Industry-leading Research  

Understanding server performance and efficiency is a full time job at Techbuyer! We have a dedicated research team working on understanding best practices for server performance and efficiency to better inform the server configurations we design for our clients.  

Our team, Nour Rteil, Kat Burdett and Stephen Clement, have created a bespoke wind tunnel in which they can test the conditions of different data centre environments on server performance. With this research, we can test device efficiency within different environments to better understand best practices with server configuration. 

The research we do, and the findings our team have published, help us to create devices that are not only unmatched in terms of price, but also meet performance needs as efficiently as possible.  

Over the course of the past 5 years, we have conducted research into the performance of new equipment against refurbished server configurations and the impact of BIOS settings and RAM server slot population. Our expert team use these findings to create a highly powerful and efficient solution for your organisation.  

The Performance of Refurbished Measured Against New 

In 2021 we concluded a two-year research project with the University of East London; this project proved that, with the right configuration, refurbished servers performed as well, and as efficiently, as new devices. Furthermore, the study proved that refurbished servers, again with the right configuration, were capable of outperforming newer generations.  

This study helped to fight the case for refurbished devices and demonstrated that second-hand doesn’t mean compromise; you can receive all the benefits of new with a reduction in cost. This is a principal that we apply when designing configure-to-order servers for our clients, utilising refurbished technology to maximise budgets where possible.  

Read more in our IEEE published research paper here.  

Choosing the Correct BIOS Settings for Your Server Environment 

When running your server solution, balancing power and performance is best practice to get the most out of your infrastructure. Not only is it essential for energy efficiency, but it also has an impact on device performance.  

Power management systems in a server allow for both performance and efficiency modes but often there is concern that efficiency mode will reduce performance. 

We conducted research, comparing multiple generations of servers from the last decade to measure balanced settings against performance settings. We then explored the benefits of using a more efficient BIOS setting from a performance standpoint.  

This study demonstrated that, given a typical server utilisation, there is very little reason to use the maximum performance setting for general workload use. This means that, using a balanced setting you are able to reduce running costs without seeing a reduction in performance within your technology. 

We use this research to match your workload requirements with a powerful enough device to utilise the most efficient and productive BIOS settings for your company. Read this full research paper here.  

The Effects of RAM Population  

When creating a server configuration, or adding additional RAM to your device, we discovered that the RAM slot population plays an important role in the efficiency of your device. The more RAM slots we populate, the more efficient a device becomes, boosting performance and productivity. Populating all available memory channels creates the optimal configuration for energy efficiency.  

These findings, we again work into the server configurations we generate and build for clients to ensure the best possible performance for the best price. This could look like using smaller capacities of RAM to populate more channels and boost efficiency.  

Explore the research into this methodology and our findings here.  

Techbuyer’s Server Configuration Build Services 

A lot goes into the server configurations that we design for our clients, including industry-leading research, technical expertise and high-quality, tested refurbished IT hardware.  

We work with your company to design the ideal solution that meets all your needs and provides the best possible performance and efficiency.  

We then build your solution free-of-charge and can ship within the UK to be with you for the next working day. This means that, from initial communication, you could receive a bespoke, high-performance server solution within 24 hours!  

Contact our team for a FREE specification quote now or find out more about what this service offers you here.