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April 27, 2005
Feel the 1U love...
So, I'm in the market for a 1U server. My only real choice is a Xserve G5 or an Opteron-based solution. Intel doesn't factor in for me, they might hold the bulk of the CPU market, but as Microsoft goes to show you, being the market leader doesn't necessarily mean you have the best product in the market. I'm not a huge fan of the Intel server offerings out there.
Tyan makes a cool dual-socket 1U Opteron case which I can find online for ~$900. It's certainly not as sexy as a Xserve (and doesn't have all the neat monitoring/admin tools bundled), but it has four sata trays, which would let me hold 1.6TB in 1U of height. The cooling on it looks adequate enough to run four drives.
I'm pretty excited about the new Opteron dual-core cpus that are starting to trickle out. The 270 seems to be perfect for what I'm looking for, a dual-socket box would give 4 x 2.0GHz. The prices are pretty high on the new Opterons though, it looks like I'd be paying $1k per cpu for the 270, which is the dual-core 2.0GHz model. Hopefully the price would go down over the next few months, but who knows. I'd certainly take 4 x 1.8GHz versus 2 x 2.6GHz (2x265 vs 2x252, they're roughly $850 per socket now).
That's $2600 for a 4 x 1.8 Opteron 1U case, and then after factoring in 4x400GB sata drives ($1000) and N GB of 1GB DDR400 ECC ram ($150 per gig), you come out at $4200 for a 4GB system, and $4800 for a 8GB system. With 7.2 GHz of cpu and 1.6TB of raw storage. Oh, and tack on another $125 for an internal 250GB operating system drive. So basically, $5k.
And I can dial that back by putting in less drives up front, and getting less ram. $2600 for the base 1U case and the four cpus is pretty good, though.
On the XServe front, things are a little bit more expensive. $4k for the base 2x2.3 model, and then I have to put in ram and drives at the same cost for the Opteron solution ($250 per 400GB of sata drive with a three drive limit, $125 per 1GB of ECC ram). The Xserve has better monitoring and system information (there are multiple temperature and fan sensors you can monitor), and many more options for multimedia programming. It's easier to get support for, and it's pretty much plug-and-play with Xserve raid. I'm also guaranteed that things like the onboard gigabit ethernet will just work without any tweaking or driver machinations, and that the system in general will be pretty rock solid stable. From what I've learned, the amd64 variants of Linux and FreeBSD are still shaking the bugs out and aren't quite as stable as their i386 cousins.
So in the short term, I'll probably end up purchasing a Xserve and explore using it for video and image transcoding, and then will eventually purchase a dual-core Opteron for doing low-level http cache work, or perhaps put it into service as a database host running PostgreSQL.
The nice thing about 1U is that it's not just a standard for racking computer hardware, it's a standard for audio hardware as well. And there are tons of relatively cheap 8U and 12U gig cases with hardened shells that would make a great portable rack. They have latches on the front and back, so you can lock up the whole shebang and put it in your car and go somewhere, and then take the front and back panels off the case when you've plugged it in. Throw in a 1U power conditioner and a 1U gigabit switch, and you have a human-portable micro datacenter.
That's the appeal of 1U servers to me, I can fit 25-50GHz in a large suitcase and take it anywhere (well, it would weigh 35 lbs x the number of servers, so maybe I'd need something with wheels and a handle, but you get the idea).
I'll leave the business case for having that much power in a small portable case versus in a rack in a HVAC-enabled datacenter as an exercise for the reader...
Posted by djb at April 27, 2005 02:38 PM