On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 11:45:13PM +0000, Ed W wrote:
> I think the Atom processors are fairly underpowered compared with even
> an old school Celeron and certainly the Core X line? I believe they
Apparently a 1.6 GHz Atom core is around 1.4 GHz Pentium M. So
around twice the performance with both cores (not hyperthreading)
enabled.
In terms of performance/power ratio they're pretty good though, and in
terms of absolute power drawn and price they're only beaten by
ARM. Of course I can't buy an rackmount server based on ARM
with IPMI (KVM + remote media) with 2 Intel NICs for 305 EUR, so
this is the best system I've found so far. SunFire X2100 M2 went
for around 407 EUR at some time, and of course you can upgrade
them with quad-cores -- and these did take up to 8 GByte ECC
memory.
And in practical terms most vserver guests run idle, so I/O
contention would seem to be the bottleneck, especially with more powerful
hardware which can host hundreds of guests. I'm expecting that an SSD on
a dual-core Atom platform with 20-40 guests should offer a pretty
good responsibility. I also think that SSDs should tolerate higher
ambient temperatures better than hard drives. Plus, they're completely
immune to vibrations.
The rackmounts are short enough so that you can mount them back-to-back
(with one or two fans added, the latest Supermicro only has one fan in
the power supply, this works well with the so-called chimney effect).
So in principle you can mount up to 80 of such platforms in a single
rack, which allows you to serve around 1-3 kGuests from a single rack.
I presume the bottleneck is the network connection(s) at that density,
but 2-3 FastEthernet drops should be able to handle that (given that
some >90% of them are idle at any time).
> have much shorter pipelines and small cache's - however, please check
> anandtech and the likes for more accurate info...
>
> I guess it depends on your budget, but the I3's are fairly inexpensive
> and decent speeds? Probably even some slightly older boards which
> support Core2 and pickup some processor off ebay? (I was looking at some
> I3 supermicro stuff this week...)
I need something which would have IPMI and take ECC memory. Something with
4x SATA or SAS 3.5" hotplug (empty caddies), and 2 Intel NICs, 8-16 GByte
of ECC (DDR2 or DDR3). It seems such a system shouldn't cost more than
500-600 EUR, but so far I've been unable to find it.
> Also remember that if you call the Dell business advisor, or your local
> supermicro salesman (and presumably the HP, etc guys) then the prices
> collapse compared with the list prices.
Unfortunately all manufactures but Supermicro insist to sell you the drives
along with the caddies. While I understand the rationale, I definitely do
not need the support I'd be paying for.
-- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BEReceived on Sun Mar 7 12:31:47 2010