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.

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

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.

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

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.

sweet.... looks like you have room to grow there :)

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.

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

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.

lol
is there same price at some international place ?

BR,
Ross

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?!!

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.

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

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...

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

Thanks Erwin, I've been looking around for other server companys off and on. I'll definatly take a look at softlayer :)

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?

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.

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?

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).

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!

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. :)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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)