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Combinatorial Credit Crunch

Got the pricing for the new servers.

The single-processor pricing is scary.  The competition is offering Core i7 servers as low as $249 for a 2.66GHz i7 with 12GB of RAM.  SoftLayer's cheapest is $299 for a 2GHz Xeon 5506 with 3GB of RAM.

But by taking advantage of their specials, a dual 2.26GHz Xeon 5520 with 12GB of RAM is only $399.  More expensive, yes, but two CPUs vs one and proper server hardware with ECC RAM (expandable to 48GB, too).

One of those - with a bit more memory, RAID, an SSD, and OpenVZ - could handle both mu.nu and mee.nu easily, except for bandwidth requirements.  The best option for now might be one big powerful server, and one small server for backups, ermgencies, and bandwidth pooling.  (Each SoftLayer server comes with 2TB of bandwidth.)

Yeah.  I think that will work, and won't crunch the budget too much.  Could even work out cheaper than the three servers we have now.  I'll have to play around with the configurator thingy some more.

Update: So what we're looking at is:

Akane

2 x Xeon 5520 (2.26GHz, quad core, hyperthreaded)
18GB DDR3 ECC Registered RAM
3 x 1TB SATA w. Hardware RAID-5
32GB Intel X25-E SSD
CentOS 5 / OpenVZ / CPanel

Mikan and/or Kurumi

Opteron 170 (2.0GHz, dual-core)
2GB DDR ECC Registered RAM
250GB SATA
CentOS 5 / OpenVZ / Maybe CPanel

Akane and her virtual sisters will handle the bulk of the work, while Mikan and/or Kurumi handle backups and front-end processing.

It's a pretty good config, and even with two small FEPs ..costs no more than I'm paying now.  I think it's a go, but I'll contact sales first and see what they say. 

I might go for 24GB of RAM; from a recent low of 62¢ the Australian dollar is now back around 72¢.  Not as nice (for me) as when it was near parity, but still an improvement.  Guess I have one thing to thank Obama for...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Judicious Application Of Explosives

Since the nice 2.66GHz Xeon 3500 servers I wanted are a non-starter (thanks SuperMicro, you weenies), I'm looking at dual-processor boxes.  They'll cost more, but of course they'll deliver more.  But the affordable processor models are the slower end of the range, so we're looking at 2GHz or maybe 2.26GHz.  (But we'll have two of them per server, each quad core and hyperthreaded, so 16 virtual cores.)

Once I get pricing (soon, I hope), I'll twist the arm of the friendly sales people a bit and order the new boxes.

Just as a side note: A 2.53GHz Xeon X5540 costs more than two 2.26GHz X5520's.  There's diminishing returns, and then there's Intel's server pricing structure...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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