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What is the most powerful server we can rent from a datacenter?
We need more and more powerful hardware for the most demanding applications and for the increasing number of users served. Even so most of the big datacenters will not offer (at least in their standard offer) the top hardware systems that are available to date. Why? well because this might not be economical (they will get their investment in purchasing the server hardware in too much time), or they might have established ongoing deals with hardware manufactures for a high lot of servers (that they received the proper discount of course) and want to finish them first.
The fact is that until yesterday the most powerful hardware that I have seen available on any datacenter I am familiar with, were the Dual Xeon CPU (2 x 3.6GHz Intel XEON) and AMD Dual Opteron (2 x Dual Core Opteron 265) based servers. No Quad Xeon CPUs nor the Dual Core from Intel was in any offerings I have seen.
Yesterday ThePlanet and EV1 announced that they will offer a new line of servers with the New Intel Woodcrest Processor Technology:
http://www.theplanet.com/newsroom/release.html?id=20060720
The most powerful system is:
Dell PowerEdge 1950
(2) Dual Core Intel 5130 Woodcrest Processors
2048MB (Fully buffered DIMMS) RAM
2 x 250GB SATA II Hard Drive
2500GB Bandwidth
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1950?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
The servers are powered by the next generation of Dell PowerEdge Servers 1950 (Dell’s 9th generation of servers)
My personal opinion:
Even if they have chosen to not use SCSI HDDs, it looks very cool, and I can’t wait to see one such server running… :-).
ThePlanet have finally decided to start using 1U rack optimized servers… lol… after offering only tower based servers (P1800, P1600) they have finally learned that space is important :-).
Are you aware of more powerful servers available to rent in any major US datacenter? Please let me know so I can add them here if there are others available that I am not aware of.
21st July 2006, 14:30
I just got one of these 1950’s in for testing from dell. Ours is very similar execpt we have 2 x 73gig SAS drives in raid 1. One word of warning. Nothing with a 2.4 kernel will work with SAS, well as ive found so far. We use FC4 on these appliances and it does not detect the drives nor the nic. Also on the 1950’s they went to a broadcom chipset on the dual 1000mbs nic’s. the bx2 chipset drivers so far Ive only seen in 2.6 kernels. So right now Im working on transitioning our packages from FedoraCore 4 to FC5. So yea they are fast and small….but not an easy transition for people that may have custom builds or scripts
24th July 2006, 06:50
Kevin,
Thanks for your comment. Unfortunately I will not be able to test this in the next days as I was expecting… I have a client that has several servers on theplanet and they didn’t want to add this to his setup. They said that the new servers are available only on their new datacenter (D6, hmm), and could not add it near the old ones… I hate these things so much… Anyway maybe in the future I will see this in action.
Cheers,
- Marius -
28th August 2006, 18:32
I have this server. And I’m running Ubuntu 6.0.6.1 update from 6.0.6 via apt-get dist-upgrade.
The main problem was the megaraid_sas driver issue if you look on the ubuntu forums it tells how to get around that.
Then once you configure /etc/network/interfaces with the auto eth0 and the ip addresses then you don’t have to modprobe bnx2.
28th August 2006, 19:07
I will have such a server deployed on EV1 sometime during the next weeks so I will see for myself if there are any software problems with it… Though, I will be running Debian on it (it will come installed with RHEL and I will reinstall it remotely to Debian Etch). I’ll keep you posted if I see any problems.
12th October 2007, 06:45
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