A quick guide to buying a workstation class machine to use for software development
Most major PC vendors have a workstation range now, with a build quality designed for applications with a Service Level Agreement. These machines run to high specifications - basically the most powerful mainstream hardware available - and better build quality than a typical business or consumer grade desktop. They also tend to have better I/O than standard PC hardware and the two-socket models can often take large amounts of memory - up to 192GB on some Nelahem based systems.
Historically, workstation was a term used for unix-based hardware from vendors such as Sun, but the last RISC based workstation lines are being phased out by Sun and IBM, and SGI and HP haven't made a RISC-based line for several years. The larger R&D and fabrication budgets for x86 and X86-64 chips mean that these technologies have caught up with and overtaken the historical performance advantage of RISC architectures. The RISC architectures now have no performance advantage to offer and the availability of Linux and MacOS mean that you can use a unix-based toolchain on commodity hardware. Now, the high-spec machines use the same instruction set as the commodity PC hardware.
Why might I buy a machine like this?
These machines tend to be somewhat more expensive than mass market consumer or office grade systems. The top end of CPUs in mass market PCs are not significantly slower than the CPUs in a single-socket workstation system, and in some cases no slower at all. Typically, someone buying machinery like this would do so for one of the following reasons:
Memory: Often, systems of this type can take very large amounts of memory. By using third party memory sources, systems with 16, 32 or 64GB of RAM can be built for figures that fit well within the original poster's hypothetical $10,000 budget. Also, these machines typically use ECC RAM - especially two-socket systems, which use the same memory components as servers. Recent evidence suggests that memory errors are more common than previously thought, so a machine with a large amount of memory actually has a non-trivial probability of getting a single bit error.
Certification: Many applications will only qualify for vendor support or warranty if run on certified hardware configurations. The vendors of workstation systems tend to participate in certification programmes. They also support specific parts inventory for longer than they do with mass market systems.
SLA and Warranty: Machines of this sort are built to support a service level agreement and tend to be of somewhat higher build quality than a mass market system (for example avoiding the use of lower-grade capacitors). They have longer warranties and a more rigorous QA and design testing process. Also, they will often qualify for vendor support for longer than a mass market system (see below).
Performance: Less of an issue than it used to be, but two socket machines allow more cores than the single socket configurations found in mass market hardware. Consumer chipsets tend not to support multiple socket configurations. Applications that can take advantage of multiple processes or threads (e.g. large compile jobs) can get performance benefits from this type of system.
I/O: Workstation systems tend to have faster I/O than mass market hardware. People doing I/O heavy activities such as video editing, GIS, or database development (in the case of the author) can benefit from a machine with a fast disk subsystem and I/O bus.
Preferred Supplier and Branding: This is mainly of interest in reseller or consultancy situations, but being seen to use hardware from a tier-1 vendor may be beneficial or even necessary to sales. Also, many organisations require that you buy from a preferred supplier, which may preclude white-box systems.
Vendor Support: For various reasons, you may want a machine with a higher level of vendor support. Vendors tend to provide rather better support for this type of machine than they do for mass market PCs. For example, I had occasion once to get a restore CD for an IBM Intellistation. IBM duly took my support call, identified the appropriate FRU number, and posted me a CD for free - on a machine that I had purchased secondhand but was still in warranty.
Single Vendor: White box suppliers might not supply pre-built machines of this specification (although some do, particularly vendors selling to the media industry). If you want a two-socket machine (for example) buying a machine of this type might be the easiest way to get a system that fits the requirement.
For development work the main reasons are likely to be 'Single Vendor' (as the original poster wanted), better standard of vendor support and possible restrictions on preferred suppliers. If your company is buying the machine the last of those is more likely to be an issue than one purchased as an individual. In some cases, fast CPU, large memory footprints or fast I/O may be desirable for certain types of development work. Even relatively prosaic development tasks such as business intelligence, sharepoint, large compiled applications or numerical or financial modelling can be quite resource-hungry.
Contemporary Workstations
At the bottom end of the range most PC vendors offer a single-socket machine that's about the same spec as a high-end single socket PC. The top end of the ranges runs to two-socket machines with server chipsets on the motherboard and attendant fast I/O (PCI-e x4, x8 and 64-bit PCIX/100-133).
If you're not doing anything I/O heavy, $10,000 sounds a lot for a desktop machine. For that, you could buy a top-end 2-socket workstation and load it with fast SAS disks, plus all the monitors you could imagine - and still have several thousand dollars in change. A single-socket workstation is considerably cheaper. Also, most 32-bit desktop O/S configurations will only use 4GB of RAM. Larger memory configurations are only likely to be useful if you have a 64-bit O/S and applications that work with data sets on that scale.
Two-socket systems
Unless you're out to run MacOS, the Apple Mac Pro is really just a two-socket workstation in drag. Apple's build quality is usually pretty good, but you can get similar spec hardware from any of several manufacturers. Aside from running MacOS, there's no compelling argument for this system in particular. However, the Mac Pro is no more expensive (if anything, cheaper) than an equivalent system from HP, Lenovo or Fujitsu - so there is no particular reason to avoid it either.
Without getting into exotic custom or semi-custom hardware these are about the most powerful workstation systems you can buy off the shelf. Most of the major PC vendors have two-socket Opteron or Xeon models in their range. Sun used to produce one (the Ultra 40) until fairly recently but this has been discontinued. For some manufacturers you may have to locate an appropriate retailer, typically one that sells to business customers. Apple and Dell sell through their normal channels.
Examples of such systems are:
Single socket workstations
Unless you have a requirement for very large builds (thanks Brian Knoblauch for reminding) or I/O fast enough for HD video editing or data warehouse development, these machines might be overkill, and they are quite expensive. Most of these vendors also produce single-socket machines that are quite a bit cheaper and will take one or two fast disks - which is likely to be all you need for most development tasks.
Examples of single socket workstation class systems are:
These are not necessarily much faster than a high-spec PC,, although they often have wider non-video PCI-e slots than the x1 items normally found on a commodity PC (for example the HP XW4600 has a PCI-e x4 slot). However, they are built for an SLA and (presumably) offer somewhat better build quality than commodity consumer or office grade hardware. You can buy a machine of this type with a couple of fast hard disks, (say) 4GB or RAM and one or two 20" or 24" monitors for less than half of the hypothetical $10,000 budget. Unless I was doing something highly CPU or I/O bound one of these would probably be fine - at a guess I'd say the Sun Ultra 24 probably has the best build quality.
Four socket systems
Some manufacturers such as Tyan or Asus make quad-opteron workstation motherboards or motherboards with PCI-e x16 slots that can be used for graphics cards. Although none of the larger manufacturers offer quad-opteron workstations, systems of this type can be obtained from smaller boutique white-box vendors. These are really niche market items; systems of this sort tend to be expensive and physically large (often based on server cases) and are mainly of interest for CPU-bound numerical computing tasks.
More than two monitors
One item to note is that if you want more than two monitors you might want to consider a two-socket Xeon or Opteron based workstation. Many of these systems have two PCE-e x16 slots so you can put two video cards in them. With only one slot your options for video hardware a limited to a multi-monitor card such as the Quadro NVS450 or additional PCI video cards.
Two-socket opteron systems and the most recent generation of xeon systems are the only widely available workstation architectures with this feature - the only other place this feature crops up is on motherboards aimed at gaming PC's. This facility is starting to make its appearance on single-socket machines such as the HP Z400 but the PSUs in these systems only have limited capacity to support high-end video hardware.
Buying a workstation on the cheap
A secondhand workstation system may be of interest for several reasons. Although not necessarily cutting edge, the CPU's on most recent workstation systems are still pretty fast. The build quality, fast I/O or large memory capacity may all be of interest and are potential reasons you may want to purchase a system of this sort. Secondhand or ex-demo systems (Particularly Macs and Xeon-based HP's) tend to turn up on Ebay quite regularly,
Many are bought or leased by media types, who turn them over fairly quickly. Ex-demo or ex-lease systems can often be purchased for a small fraction of their new price. Now that the performance gains of individual cores are flattening out, the difference between a current machine and one that's 2 or 3 years old isn't all that great. It's really down to number of cores now.
I've been using XW9300's (the predecessor of the XW9400) with internal SCSI disk arrays as database development machines for about a year and a half now and found them to be the best hardware I've used recently. Primarily I bought them for the fast I/O, although Analysis Services is quite CPU-hungry as well.
I bought these machines secondhand off Ebay (mostly ex-demo machines) and fitted 5 or 6 fast SCSI disks to them for DB development; recently I bought RAID controllers for them as well. In this sort of configuration you might expect to pay over $5000 for a new machine, but certainly less than $10,000. Typically you would pay less than half of that for a machine from ebay or secondary market sources for disks and other components.
Parts and upgrades
There is quite a substantial secondary market for SCSI and SAS disks if you want to put a couple of 15k drives in it. Memory for these machines (the two socket models tend to use registered memory) is also much cheaper off Ebay than the retail price from the vendor. If desired, you can quite readily upgrade the CPU (for example a single-core to dual core) as dual-core Xeons, Opterons and suitable CPU fans tend to be quite readily available off ebay.
The part numbers tend to be quite well documented, at least on HP machines, and they are often listed on ebay by part number. The machines also take standard components. If buying generic CPU or memory upgrades do your homework to make sure you have the right type of component for the machine. One thing to note is that the cases on the two socket machines often have internal ducting. Third party CPU and case fans may not fit the ducts, so you are probably better off researching the manufacturer's part numbers and buying the appropriate component. Often you can order these directly from the manufacturer and they may not be disproportionately expensive.
Some machines (Sun and Apple come to mind here) often have proprietary drive caddies that aren't shipped with the machine, and you need the caddy to mount the drive. This can be a gotcha when you go to put third party drives in the machine. HP and IBM are better behaved here. All the XW9300's and Intellistations I've bought had their clip-on drive rails supplied as shipped, although I've never seen a Lenovo S10 or D10 up close so I don't know whether they have continued this practice.