How many have moved to dual Opteron servers ?

[eva2000]

As outlined at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=160103 dual AMD64 Opteron cpus give more bang for the buck when it comes to Apache and MySQL for high concurrency handling.

So how many of you folks have moved or considered moving from Intel/Xeon based servers to dual Opteron servers ?

If you have moved, care to share how it has improved your forum's performance compared to before ?

[AdminNation]

So how many of you folks have moved or considered moving from Intel/Xeon based servers to dual Opteron servers ?


We're looking at doing that in about 12 months. For now our server more than meets our needs.

[turkforum]

I am using two dual opteron 252 8gb ram scsi disk servers ( Webserver and Mysql connected via LAN). Performace is awesome with Windows server.
I will never use Apache and linux combination for webserver anymore.
Never seen my site that fast before
I do advice dual opterons to anyone who can find a good Datacenter.
I am at one of the DCs in L.A

[RMS-Chef]

We moved from dual Xeon 2.8s to dual Opteron 246s and noticed a decient improvment. In the process we also were using IDE drives with the Xeons and have SCSI with the Opterons so I imagine that helped as well.

[Paul M]

Not at the moment, our Xeon is running fine. You're also limited by what your choice of DC actually offers.

[Romeos Tune]

Dual Xeon's here. Plenty happy with'em.

[BigSoccer Tech.]

Eva

As you know we have 8 massively powerful dual xeons and are bumping up against our limit. Our intention was to have all our sites on one db server with 3 slaves for searches and reads. This wasn't working so we moved our largest site to it's own dual xeon with a second for searching, and left the remaining sites on the other two boxes. This has really freed up a ton of capacity, but who knows what will happen when the world cup comes and our traffic goes 500%

4x Web servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 2 GB Ram, 2 X 80 GB with Raid 1
3x DB servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 8 GB Ram, 3 X 73 GB SCSI U320 10K RPM with Raid 5
1x DB server: Dual P4
2x Load balancers: Dual P4 3.0 ghz, 1gb Ram

Apache/Linux
PHP 4.4.1
MySQL 4.0.24

[MentaL]

went from dual xeon 2.8ghz with 2 gig of ram and minumum load of 50 to

dual opteron 264 with 2gig of ram to a load average of 2.

[cirisme]

I wanted to go Opterons when we first got this server, but found a great deal on Dual Xeons. It's been running great, but I've been semi-seriously thinking about finding cheap(er) dual opterons.

[MentaL]

your sites will be faster on opterons, garanteed.

[cirisme]

our biggest problem has always been disk speed, not proc. speed. But I definitely agree Opterons are much better.

[kerplunknet]

I wanted to go Opterons when we first got this server, but found a great deal on Dual Xeons. It's been running great, but I've been semi-seriously thinking about finding cheap(er) dual opterons.
You get what you pay for. :)

[cirisme]

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it's not particularly relevant to our needs.

[AdminNation]

You get what you pay for. :)

But if that were always true, then that would mean that IPB would be better than vB, which we all know is bull.:bunny:

[Princeton]

some great info ... I've been using DUAL XEON servers for quite some time ...
It may be time to make a switch. (time to do some research) :up:

(subscribes to thread)

[TheEDIGuy]

I'm switching this weekend from Xeons to Opterons. The performance increase will be well worth it.

I'm also switching to RAID, so I can sleep better at night regarding drive failure.

[ALanJay]

Some of our machines are twin opterons and during a test period eariler in the year we had 2 Opterons spare which we used for HTML serving and they did a great job. We are now looking at bring in a number of twin Opterons for both HTML and mySQL serving as they do seem to be a much better buy.

[cirisme]

I have a question for those of you with dual Opteron servers or who are getting them: what providers are you using? How has the service been?

[MGSteve]

I'm just about to upgrade to Dual Opteron from a Single CPU (don't laugh). The current box is sweating a bit under the load at the moment, so its an upgrade not before time.

Will let you know the outcome, but I don't know how useful it will be as we're going from a P4 3.4Ghz to a Dual Opteron & gaining another 2GB of Ram at the same time, which everything together equals probably a trippling of resources for VB to gobble up! lol

[Erwin]

Where are you guys hosting your Dual Opterons? I'm still using Dual Xeon boxes but Dual Opterons would be peachy.

[The Prohacker]

I'm just about to upgrade to Dual Opteron from a Single CPU (don't laugh). The current box is sweating a bit under the load at the moment, so its an upgrade not before time.

Will let you know the outcome, but I don't know how useful it will be as we're going from a P4 3.4Ghz to a Dual Opteron & gaining another 2GB of Ram at the same time, which everything together equals probably a trippling of resources for VB to gobble up! lol

We are also looking at going the Opteron route for our new DB servers. We have found that the true CPU usage isn't the problem. It's disk IO, we are exploring different types of RAID levels and different interfaces. I'm rather intrigued by Serial Attached Scsi. The price is rather high for 15k 73gb drives, but might be a good fix to our IOwait issues when paired with RAID 10. I just can't trust SATA for mission critical data such as DB servers yet. We might do RAID5 with SATA on our web servers though.

Where are you guys hosting your Dual Opterons? I'm still using Dual Xeon boxes but Dual Opterons would be peachy.


I've found it always best to email perspective hosts, and ask if they can special order certain parts I want in. They might not list them on their site, but most hosts can have things drop shipped.

[MGSteve]

We are also looking at going the Opteron route for our new DB servers. We have found that the true CPU usage isn't the problem. It's disk IO, we are exploring different types of RAID levels and different interfaces. I'm rather intrigued by Serial Attached Scsi. The price is rather high for 15k 73gb drives, but might be a good fix to our IOwait issues when paired with RAID 10. I just can't trust SATA for mission critical data such as DB servers yet. We might do RAID5 with SATA on our web servers though. SATA isn't a problem IMO, as long as you go with a reputable manufacturer - i.e don't use the onboard stuff, as its usually pants (not that any one here would do anyway, I'm sure). Adaptec do some SATA stuff now as well as SCSI. If it were my choice (and not the hosting companies), I may well look seriously into the SATA route. One area you may well loose out on could be SCSI features, although SATA now has NCQ to mention one. Anyway, I wouldn't rule it out quite so fast.

As for above - yeah, it was a question I had when I was trying to determine the reason behind the load. Although the mySQL server gets hit like hell, the load indicator showed it was the CPU which was the limiting factor as the CPU load would normally reach high 90s during really heavy times and then the RAM would get exhausted because it wasn't processing requests quickly enough and then swap file came into use, made everything a million times worse and... well, I'm sure you all know the rest of the story! ;)

To answer the question above - mine is hosted at Positive Internet in the UK (www.positive-internet.com), they aren't cheap, but you do get what you pay for. First class (and I cannot fault them at all) support & assitance. They've gone above and beyond the call of duty so many times I've started handing out medals.

[SZ|TalonKarrde]

rusko.us gave me a rather decent quote on some opteron machines a ways back. WHT is also a good place to look for specials with opterons, and they do have a host finder thingamajig that allows you to specify opterons in the options, I believe.

[FlyBoy73]

We are currently using (2) Dual Xeon Servers. 1 for Web and the other for data base. Both have (2) 73gig 10k SCSI HDs, but not raid. We've been taxing and maxing them for the last few months and use EV1.

Later this month I will be purchasing (not leasing) Opteron 270 powered servers. I'm hopefully going to be contracting the server godfather here sometime soon to have a look and let us know exactly what we need, but no matter what it is going to be Opteron. I've studied them up and down and there is little (if anything) that can dispute the Opterons dominance in the server market over Xeons of today (and especially yesterday). My xeons have performed pretty well but with Opterons prices being cut almost in half and their history of excellent performance over the past few years, there is no question in my mind what we're going to now.

I have also studied up on SATA drives, and while they are fast (especially the raptors) in single user environments, they are still a good ways behind scsi in heavy I/O situations such as data base operations. We're going with a top of the line SCSI RAID card and u320 15k RPM hard drives, most likely running RAID 10 for the database. We'll probably use SATA Raptors for the web server running RAID 1. Both will have 2x Opteron 270 dual cores and plenty of RAM. Still undecided on using a Supermicro or Tyan Thunder mother boards..

We will save a pretty nice chunk of change on monthly hosting expenses going from leased dedicated to COLO'ing. I am in Houston but I can't find a colo facility down here that won't end up nailing us on bandwidth fees so I am thinking we are going to colo at www.dedicatednow.com . They give you 2,000 Gigs a month using a 1u/2u or mini-tower server for $99/mo plus different management plans if you want them to handle that type of thing in house. As we grow, we can keep adding servers as needed. I'm really tired of leasing servers and will be happy to purchase our own where I know the history of the equipment (we've had two hard drives go bad in the last 4 months on the same server) and it doesn't cost us a huge amount of money each month to have really powerful machines. If we want more RAM, we pay once rather than a setup fee and then a monthly.

[SZ|TalonKarrde]

There's some nice colo places in Texas, though, most are in Dallas.

http://cologuys.com is in Dallas, and has reasonable prices. They host some of the larger webcomics out there.
http://colo4dallas.com/ is very good, but expensive.
http://www.layeredtech.com/ can get you colo at the Savvis datacenter, however, you have to contact them to get a price quote.
http://www.theplanet.com/ also has colo, but same story as LT on pricing.


There's also a lot of companies in the Infomart who offer colo, more than I can list here.

[FlyBoy73]

I talked to Layeredtech re: the Savvis data center but they were not very interested in COLO'ing unless you get a 1/2 or full rack, if memory serves. I need 2 max at the moment but will likely be expanding soon.

Thanks for the info

[AdminNation]

We're looking at doing that in about 12 months. For now our server more than meets our needs.

I take that back. We may be moving to one in a few weeks.

[TheEDIGuy]

I'm going with www.softlayer.com for my Opterons. They're new, but I've talked extensively with them, and I believe they can do the right thing for me. And they're going to be introducing load-balancing options in about 2 weeks.

[DevilYellow]

My board isnt 'huge' but still large enough (800mb db), we've been running dual 246's and "toying" with the idea of upgrading to 275's. Current server built off a Tyan Thunder K8SR (S2881).

Instead of that I might just build a DB server when it comes to upgrade and use top end dual core opterons for that and set up a SCSI RAID the way I really would like to for the DB instead of the SATA RAID that we currently use.

Colo in Michigan with a friend - works out very well. 2 1000mbit bonded and attached to two different switches.

[MentaL]

i use my dual opteron 246 with raid and 2gig ram with www.dedicatednow.com , good support.

[Erwin]

Please post a list of hosting companies that supply dual core opterons and offer private racks or networks. :) I would be interested.

[Andreas]

I'd be interested too, as at least in Germany dual opteron offers seem to be very rare.

[MentaL]

tried webhostingtalk.com Erwin?

[FlyBoy73]

New thread for this? If so, I'll share all that I have compiled so far.

[Erwin]

New thread for this? If so, I'll share all that I have compiled so far.
Please do. :)

As for webhostingtalk - I've gone there, but would like to see if anyone has got a definitive list.

[kerplunknet]

I still will never understand why people waste money on dedicated servers. We have purchased about ten servers in the past and have had them co-located with Defender Hosting (.com) for the past three years. Never had any problems.

Our most recent server purchase:

Dual AMD Opteron 270, Dual Core
8 GB RAM
4x 74 GB 15,000 RPM – RAID 10
Fedora Core 4 Linux, 64-bit

It's BLAZING fast.

[SZ|TalonKarrde]

Softlayer is run by a large contingent of The Planet people who left to start up their own company - Great guys, I think.

[99SIVTEC]

Just finished building a new db server for a project. Has 8 dual core opterons for a total of 16 processors in the one box. Should crank out enough for our needs for the next couple years.

[lazytown]

When you colo, what happens if a piece of hardware fails? (hard drive, ram, or god forbid the motherboard)? Wouldn't you then have immense downtime unless you have redundancy? So that then doubles the hardware you will need and the rack space.

If you're listing datacenters / hosting companies and are happy and have been with them for a while, please add them to this big forum hosting / datacenter thread (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=111412)

-vissa

[kontrabass]

I'm a little late to the party, but I've got a dedicated DB box with dual opterons and can't rave enough about the performance, after putting up with Xeons for a log time - I can hardly believe it. 2.5M posts, 600 users online now, and server load is .04 (as in, not even .1). Hosted at liquidweb.com (though I cannot wholeheartedly recommend them). I'll be colocating two of these puppies in Dallas soon.

[The Prohacker]

When you colo, what happens if a piece of hardware fails? (hard drive, ram, or god forbid the motherboard)? Wouldn't you then have immense downtime unless you have redundancy? So that then doubles the hardware you will need and the rack space.


Most datacenters have a hardware stock you can purchase if something dies. The most common failures are fans and hard drives. If your motherboard dies, you would need to have one drop shipped in and just pay for remote hands to install it.

With hard drives, most RAID controllers support running a hot spare. So you can have a hot spare incase a drive dies giving you the ability to suffer two drive failures in a RAID5 configuration.

[MrLister]

I just got a dual opteron dual core 270, with 8gb ram, 4x150gb raptor on raid 5 over at softlayer.com great guys. i defiently suggest you guys try them out for anyone looking at a opteron

[Zachery]

I still will never understand why people waste money on dedicated servers. We have purchased about ten servers in the past and have had them co-located with Defender Hosting (.com) for the past three years. Never had any problems.

Our most recent server purchase:

Dual AMD Opteron 270, Dual Core
8 GB RAM
4x 74 GB 15,000 RPM ? RAID 10
Fedora Core 4 Linux, 64-bit


It's BLAZING fast.

Because the TCO of co-located servers are insane.

A post of mine from BBA about the TCO for one of my clients

The user I was talking with required less than 200gb of bandwidth a month, And thinking about it now I didn't take into account un-metered bandwidths (the throughput plans, but those are just as costly).

I must also say his arguments were vastly flawed due to the fact he didn't take into account the original build cost for a server, added into his monthly bills. However, my post is still valid.


Honestly? You can't.

However, lets assume that you do colo, and you need way more than 200gb of bandwidth (most of the sites I'm runnin go though 500-1500GB of bandwidth a month).

The cost of building servers to acomdiate the trafic would cost upwords of 1500 dollars, not to mention my time configuring, and setting up the initial install of the OS, not to mention any license fees if I were to use one distro over another.

Ontop of this, lets say that hardware fails, perhaps my entire scsi array and drives, now I have to replace it. Cost goes up.

I'm glad colo works well for you, but it doesn't for everyone.

I just priced the servers we rent now (most of them) Each would cost me
$3,454 from dell, x 6 = 20724 for intital setup. Now, this doesn't even start to cover the bandwidth charges that I(my clients) will need to pay for. I believe all of the servers go though a total of about 4TB a month, at least to be on the safe side. Thats another 4000 a month just for colocation.

So, we have 24724 dollars just to get our first month plus setup.

In the first year we spent 68,724 on colocation fees.

Compared to 1800~ a month on retal fees, which is 21000~.

So, ontop of this, if any of my hardware fails, I am responseable for it, which means more money directly out of my clients pockets, if the reneted hardware fails, its not our problem and replaced quickly.

Sure we could sell them, but I generally don't get rid of servers.

Edit: We go though upwards for 5TB a month atm, for all of the servers.

[lazytown]

I've found in most cases that server load/capacity is generally IO limited. In other words -- hard drives, raid, etc. Lots of RAM helps a lot in caching the data. So does going from a Dual Xeon to 4/8 Opterons really make any difference if the limiting factor is your hard drive/raid speed?

-vissa

[ThorstenA]

I'd be interested too, as at least in Germany dual opteron offers seem to be very rare.
You'll find a double 246 4 GB RAM for 150 € on www.hetzner.de, but you maybe want to add RAID for 30 € more.

[eva2000]

I'm a little late to the party, but I've got a dedicated DB box with dual opterons and can't rave enough about the performance, after putting up with Xeons for a log time - I can hardly believe it. 2.5M posts, 600 users online now, and server load is .04 (as in, not even .1). Hosted at liquidweb.com (though I cannot wholeheartedly recommend them). I'll be colocating two of these puppies in Dallas soon.
sweet.... looks like you have room to grow there :)

[BigSoccer Tech.]

we use iweb. great service. they don't offer opterons but went out and bought us one to see if all this thread is true. if so, they will add it to their packages. can't rave enough.

[mfizzel]

just moved to a dual-operton server, we're flyin' now - btw, what's a healthy server load?

[SZ|TalonKarrde]

Preferably <1.0 for each processor, however, load can get much higher before things really get bad. Honestly, I've yet to see any real marker for when you'll start to have real problems. I've had machines of the same setup differ wildly - One machine will be fine at 10, and the other will have things failing at 6-7, running the same programs to test the stability.

If you're spiking up to 5 for shorts amount of time under heavy traffic, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Theoretically, you should be able to handle that much constantly, but some would question how healthy that is on parts of the machine, especially the hard drives, depending on what's being used that's causing the issue. If you're hitting higher than 5 for more than a few minutes at a time, I'd seriously suggest trying to figure out why that's happening, specificly, and seeing what you can do to optomize the server.

And load isn't always the best guide - Depending on what's causing it, you might see no performance degredation with 20, 30, or even higher.

While load is a good way a lot of the time to check the overall status of the server at a glance, looking at actual CPU and MEM usage is much better.

[masterross]

You'll find a double 246 4 GB RAM for 150 ? on www.hetzner.de (http://www.hetzner.de), but you maybe want to add RAID for 30 ? more.

lol
is there same price at some international place ?

BR,
Ross

[Kevlar]

I'm dropping my dual Xeon 1.6Ghz in favor for a dual opteron 265... hoping that'll speed things up a bit.

[Zachery]

I'm dropping my dual Xeon 1.6Ghz in favor for a dual opteron 265... hoping that'll speed things up a bit.
Dual 1.6GHZ xeons?!!

[Kevlar]

Dual 1.6GHZ xeons?!!
Yup... with the help of many to tweak them as much as possible, but I think I've finally reached their max capacity, so we acquired some new bits to upgrade from the dual xeons to dual dual-core opterons.

[scottct1]

I have moved from Dual Xeons to Dual Operons at LiquidWeb

Here are my specs...

2400 GB Premium Multi-Homed Bandwidth (1200in + 1200out)
Dual CPU + Dual Core Opteron 265
8GB DDR Registered ECC
Dual 36GB SCSI / Hardware Raid 1
Linux - CentOS 4 (x86_64)
Cpanel
50 GB Remote Backup.

Becuase of the CentOS 64 Bit I have had some issues (I can load APC or EAcellerator) but everything else is working fine.

EVA (George) helped me out a few weeks ago on my configuration files and now I am quite happy.

I am a very busy board with 1700+ online durring most of the day (60 min cookie timeout)

LiquidWeb also offers colocation and I am looking into this, as If I purchased my own server and colcated it with that I would be saving $600 a month which would pay for the server quick.

http://www.liquidweb.com/colocation/plan2/

Anyone know of some decent places online to shop for servers?

I would probably have the same config however have larger drives (and probably go with a SATA Raid setup instead of SCSI, and would probably drop down to 6 gig of ram instead of 8 as of now I am only using about 3 gig of ram and the rest is just sitting there.

I use to be with the planet but dropped them as they screwed me over when I ordered a second server, which when I spoke with them on the phone they said they could locate it in the same datacenter and cross connect my servers together...

I didn't realize this was not done until I checked my stats after having the new server for 2 weeks and found out I was way over my bandwidth for the month. I +++++ed and moaned to get it moved and they said sorry for the fact I was told on the phone I could get them in the same data center but they never guarenteed it, so then I threatened to cancel and they suddenly found a way to move my server to the correct datacenter but it was going to cost me $400. I asked if I could use my allotment of support time I was given each month (and NEVER used in the 2 years I was a customer) and they told me no, so I shopped around and found LiquidWeb, canceled theplanet and never looked back (and have been very happy with LiquidWeb)

Anyways back to my question anyone know when I can shop online for decent servers at decent prices? :)

Thanks

[Erwin]

I'm currently dealing with:

softlayer.com

The customer manager is:

Mary Hall
mhall@softlayer.com

I've known her for a few years now and she's moved from ThePlanet to SoftLayer! :) I'm going to move to softlayer... Shall keep people posted...

[lazytown]

Unfortunately, softlayer does not offer SCSI at all at this time (confirmed via email). Once they start offering that (hopefully 15K drives), I'm sure they will catch a lot more of the big boys.

Again, I'd like to ask how many of you with dual processors (or more) are really CPU bound? IMHO it's mostly about raid setup, SCSI vs SATA, hard drive speed and RAM. The dual opterons definitely seem to outperform the XEONs, but I think we are missing the forest for the trees if you get all excited about faster CPUs without understanding that the rest of the system can be much more important.

-vissa

[Zachery]

I'm currently dealing with:

softlayer.com

The customer manager is:

Mary Hall
mhall@softlayer.com

I've known her for a few years now and she's moved from ThePlanet to SoftLayer! :) I'm going to move to softlayer... Shall keep people posted...
Thanks Erwin, I've been looking around for other server companys off and on. I'll definatly take a look at softlayer :)

[Erwin]

Unfortunately, softlayer does not offer SCSI at all at this time (confirmed via email). Once they start offering that (hopefully 15K drives), I'm sure they will catch a lot more of the big boys.


Again, I'd like to ask how many of you with dual processors (or more) are really CPU bound? IMHO it's mostly about raid setup, SCSI vs SATA, hard drive speed and RAM. The dual opterons definitely seem to outperform the XEONs, but I think we are missing the forest for the trees if you get all excited about faster CPUs without understanding that the rest of the system can be much more important.

-vissa
You are correct that softlayer doesn't offer SCSI - however, I intend to get 10k Raptors with RAID 0 - surely they are not that bad that they become the bottleneck? What do people think?

[Zachery]

You are correct that softlayer doesn't offer SCSI - however, I intend to get 10k Raptors with RAID 0 - surely they are not that bad that they become the bottleneck? What do people think?
I haven't kept up on harddrive issues, however one of the benifits of scsi was its onboard controler that did the work so that the cpu(s) didn't. I do not believe that SATA has that controler, but its just overall faster. Perhaps I'm wrong?

Edit: Were having a server thats going though a mass of bandwidth, might considering switching it, or the other site we (my client) have on it to one of these single dual core machines. And I'd like to move some of our eggs out of the basket. They also have a large chunk of expandable bandwidth for a decent price. Anyone know what their network is like?

[Erwin]

The beauty of softlayer is that they have a complete backend private network that your servers automatically link to - so all your servers are automatically networked - if you want to add more servers to the network, it's as easy as just getting another server. Much easier than having a rack etc.

[joeychgo]

I am currently preparing to purchase my first colo server.

What I am strongly considering purchasing:

AMD Dual-Core Opteron 165 1.8Ghz

2x 1M L2 Cache, On-die Memory Controller

2 gig ram

Motherboard:

Tyan Tomcat K8E S2865G2NR

Socket 939 Server Board, nVidia nForce 4 Chipset

2pcs Western Digital 250G SATA HDs

WD2500SD, 7200rpm, 8-Meg Buffer,

Pre-Configured OS Software RAID

2x 250G Linux OS Software RAID1,250G Capacity on-board nVidia SATA-II 3G/Sec Controller

Chassis/Drive Bays/Cooling/Power Supply:

SuperMicro SC811T-260 1U Rackmount Chassis

2x hot-swap SATA carriers & backplane

1x slim CD bay, 1x open FDD bay

2x 4200rpm 10cm System Blower Fans

SuperMicro 260watt 1U Power Supply

Thoughts?

[FlyBoy73]

My only thought is if you can swing it financially, I would go with a 2xx series processor and a 940 series Mobo, which will give you the ability (if needed in the future) to drop in a second physical processor, just for starters. :) I also prefer the Supermicro Mobo's after researching and originally wanting Tyan (thunder in my case).

[markA4]

We just purchased a new database server for our sites with dual 265 opterons and a 15k SCSI RAID 10 set up. We are moving up from a dual 2.4 xeon with 10k SCSIs in RAID 5. I think we'll be extremely happy with the results from everything I have been reading about the opteron performance!

[Brad]

Thanks for the link Erwin, I'll be shopping for some new servers this summer. They look good and I may end up going with them. :)

[FlyBoy73]

I'm very impressed! We are now fully on our new Opteron server and it is impressively fast! We had (2) dual xeon web servers, one for web & the other for data bases, and this single server absolutely blows them out of the water. My sites have never loaded so fast!

I'll probably do a full report on the move, specs, etc shortly.

Oh, and we're successfully running WHM / cPanel with 64bit CentOS. I'm just really happy and impressed and we have not even really optimized the server or migrated the databases to the /data hard drives. All of my forums are currently running with the OS on a pair of raid-1 drives. Things should be even quicker once the data is moved to the 4 15k SAS drives running raid-10.

If you like speed and performance, go Opteron & some fast drives and you will not regret it.

[Erwin]

For databases, the secret is in the drives. :) 15k SCSI.

[FlyBoy73]

Yup! They're awesome!
I think I am going to have to purchase a couple more built with 15k drives & opterons. ;) I'm in Love. lol

[eva2000]

I'm very impressed! We are now fully on our new Opteron server and it is impressively fast! We had (2) dual xeon web servers, one for web & the other for data bases, and this single server absolutely blows them out of the water. My sites have never loaded so fast!

I'll probably do a full report on the move, specs, etc shortly.

Oh, and we're successfully running WHM / cPanel with 64bit CentOS. I'm just really happy and impressed and we have not even really optimized the server or migrated the databases to the /data hard drives. All of my forums are currently running with the OS on a pair of raid-1 drives. Things should be even quicker once the data is moved to the 4 15k SAS drives running raid-10.


If you like speed and performance, go Opteron & some fast drives and you will not regret it.
excellento!!!! glad to hear folks are discovering the power of dual opterons especially dual core dual opterons :D

[ALanJay]

excellento!!!! glad to hear folks are discovering the power of dual opterons especially dual core dual opterons :D

We now have a new HTML dual opteron server doing an excellent job and 4 dual core dual processors ones on order I'll let you know how we get on.

The reason we have our own servers is that, that way we can have the specification we need ie lots of memory and processor but relatively small fast SCSI disks.

Last year we purchases a couple of lower end dual Xeon machines which have turned out to be completly useless in comparison to the Opterons which in the same configuration are now cheaper.

[eva2000]

yup opterons are best bang for the buck in terms of performance to price ratio compared to xeons :)

[kontrabass]

I just want to put in a plug for Appro dual opteron servers, in case anyone is still looking for a solid dual-opteron solution. Anandtech did a glowing review of Appro servers a while back, and I've been using them since 2000. My last server ran for 5 years straight without even a blower going out :) They're currently offering a 1U and 3U version. Not the cheapest servers out there, but very solid.

http://www.appro.com/product/opteron_main2.asp

[TECK]

For databases, the secret is in the drives. :) 15k SCSI.
I would use a SAS 15K drive for the database. :)
It burns SCSI (in stats) like the prairie fire.

If you guys use colocation, you should definitelly go with Dell. They have a dual opteron model, SC1435. Many people at WebHostingtalk know that Dell servers are better compared to the SuperMicro custom builts for example (and cheaper also).

Ya, I like Dell. If you know what to buy from them (specific parts), you will be very happy. :)
My coding corner (http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/8297/teckofficeam6.jpg)

[dbembibre]

I would use a SAS 15K drive for the database. :)
It burns SCSI (in stats) like the prairie fire.

If you guys use colocation, you should definitelly go with Dell. They have a dual opteron model, SC1435. Many people at WebHostingtalk know that Dell servers are better compared to the SuperMicro custom builts for example (and cheaper also).

Ya, I like Dell. If you know what to buy from them (specific parts), you will be very happy. :)
My coding corner (http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/8297/teckofficeam6.jpg)

Another important question to choose Dell is the DRAC/KVM the drac save my life many times during working travels :D
I have xeons poweredge 1850 (for 3 years) and another 1950 (now)