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Thread: Quality or Quantity?
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07-04-2009, 05:57 AM #1Aspiring Evangelist
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Quality or Quantity?
Hey all,
I wanted to start a quick poll.
Of course we all know the saying "You get what you pay for". With quality also means slightly higher prices.
Wanting to aim in towards quality, at the moment we've got a range of Dell and IBM rack unit servers rather than the cheaper tower servers (referring more to unbranded tower servers). We have also started to get into blade technology but we're finding it hard with the higher prices, keeping stock is also harder. With tower servers, there is no specific RAM model requirement for this, no CPU specific etc. So you can basically mix and match (within limits). However with branded blade and rack units its a lot harder.
What are your thoughts in regards to tower servers, do you recommend them, would you purchase them, would you prefer them over the rack unit or blade servers because they are cheaper etc
Looking for your opinions and thoughts!
~AndrewLast edited by andrewklau; 07-04-2009 at 05:59 AM. Reason: small typos
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07-04-2009, 10:37 AM #2Aspiring Evangelist
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(1) Quality or Quantity: While I am sure there will be a range of opinions on the subject, the best answer will largely be determined by your business objectives and your target audience. From an engineering stand-point, computing devices whether branded or unbranded are relatively similar in terms of performance, reliability and capability.
Contrary to uninformed opinions, the idea that non-server grade computing equipment is somehow "not designed to run 24/7" and "not as reliable" as brand x equipment just goes to show how effective marketing can shape peoples perceptions of technology. With that being said, I am not suggesting that $100K computing device is remotely similar to a sub-$500 desktop system as both systems are geared towards different target audiences.
In terms of real world performance and reliability I've seen desktop-based computing devices used in highly automated production environments run for greater than 8 years. By that same token, I've done deployments where server grade (expensive) equipment rolled over and died in numbers higher than anyone expected after less than a few months in operations. Therefore, unless a product has a well document history of unreliability, then you get will really be a matter of chance.
(2) When you consider how most people use their computers in a hosting environment, those people, have a lot more computing capacity than they will actually be able to take advantage of. I mean it's great that people can now use a quad core machine to host a website that only a few years ago would have run just fine on sub 1Ghz machine, but what changed in this time period is not so much the websites but the technology. Therefore, people are buying more and more powerful machines for pretty much the same uses as before.
In my estimation and experience, the amount of people who need high-performance specialized computing devices make up about < 5% of the people purchasing such services from the online market place. These kinds of users tend to build their own systems or utilize providers that specialize in servicing those kinds of customers. Therefore, roughly 95% or more of the people looking to rent or by servers online probably really don't care that much as to if the equipment processing their bits is a brand-name or a no-name brand box.
It is also my experience, that a lot of people who claim they care about these things don't put their money where their mouths are when it comes to making such purchasing decisions.
(3) Specialized Computing Devices vs Standard Computing Devices: The choice between the two and the associated issues is pretty much well known by anyone who has any reasonable amount of experience. For example:
(a) Specialized computing equipment can be extremely efficient on space and power and in the right numbers can run a significant portion of your infrastructure. However, those space and power savings come at a big cost as you can pay upwards of $100K per unit fully loaded.
There are at least three problems with this approach:
(1) High CAPEX (you have to spend a lot of money up front)
(2) Because it is a specialized device, you will have to either (a) perpetually pay for a maintenance contract so that you can get issues addressed (4 hours) when something goes wrong or fails. (b) Purchase two of them so that you have a backup that you can take parts from when things go wrong with your primary unit. (see point CAPEX)
(3) Because the unit is likely to run a large amount of your infrastructure, a failure will be a little more catastrophic than those that happen in distributed computing environment. For example, purchased a fully redundant unit ($100K) guess what? a common element of the unit the communications-bus failed (killed the whole thing) rare but it happens. Parts fails have a hard time getting replacements for restock.
Using standard computing devices, your dollars go a lot further for reasons that should be obvious. For example, for half the cost you can purchase twice if not three times as many boxes. However there are at least four problems with this solution:
(1) Towers create sprawl that is, they are not space efficient and therefore, requires a much bigger footprint in terms of floor space required to support the equipment.
(2) Due to problem #1 if your electrical system hasn't been designed to support such an infrastructure, you will pay extra money to get the outlets where you need them. You will also pay more money in terms of the networking equipment required to support such an infrastructure.
(3) If you don't maintain significant stock of spare components you'll pay higher cost to source replacements as your production units age.
(4) Because standard computing devices are largely marketed towards end-users (consumers) the designs and form-factors can change a couple times in a year and unless you purchase everything you think you will need at the outset you are subject to market availability especially if you want to buy new as the makers would have likely moved on to the next big thing. This last point assumes that your facilities were built to support a certain setup.
Outside of the initial cost savings, one you have your boxes (cases) in place you can gut your machines to support newer technologies and reuse a lot of the components at a significant cost savings.
Hope this helps.Last edited by leeware; 07-04-2009 at 10:38 AM. Reason: Remove extra spaces
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07-04-2009, 12:19 PM #3Aspiring Evangelist
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Wow, thanks thats very helpful
You've probs out down everyone with the information (keeping everyone else quiet!) haha
Looking for everyone else's suggestions/thoughts!
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07-04-2009, 03:29 PM #4WHT Addict
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Blades are nice, and expensive. However work well with Virtualization, specifically VMWare. HA+DRS is awesome! And the iSCSI and loading ESX OS on a usb key/flash media is great.
But watch out, I know Dell Blades take up a lot of juice compared to the IBM blades. We do massive purchasing through many different educational and government agencies, and the power requirements are one of the things we look out for.
Dell and IBM have quite a bit of proprietary components. However if you look at SuperMicro (Softlayer uses only SuperMicro) you can mix and match as you would with OEM Towers. With that said, you can still mix and match with Dell and IBM, but its still not that broad as you would like it to be with server motherboards like Tyan and etc.
The issue is hardware faults, hot-swappable components, and of course space. If you can get away with a tower and it saves your butt. Great!
However if you have a co-location, going with racks and rack mounted servers is going to save you space.
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07-04-2009, 03:39 PM #5Web Hosting Master
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I dont particuarly mind what form factor servers are, as long as the hardware is decent.
I would never put an Asus/Gigabyte board in a server, but I wouldnt hesitate to put an Intel desktop board in a server. Theyre aimed for the business end of the market, and as such are rock solid and have been known to have a lower defect & failure rate than server-grade boards.
I think it really comes down to personal preference. IF we had the space/ability to use tower systems as servers I would probably go down that route due to the cost being significantly lower than rackmount or blade systems. You can still get hotswap components in tower servers.
If you use tower systems with good quality hardware I cant see that being an issue.
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07-04-2009, 06:45 PM #6Web Hosting Master
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The question is rather open-ended, but looking purely at the form factor, it would depend on your perspective.
As a customer, I would not really care whether my server was a tower or a rackmount server. My only concern with tower cases would be the power supplies they use. There is more variability in quality with desktop power supplies, so they would need to be a good server-grade brand like Seasonic.
As a provider, it would entirely depend on my co-location situation.
If I were in cabinets, then obviously rackmount would conserve space. If there were power constraints long before space constraints in the cabinet however, it might make sense to have some tower cases as well.
If I were using a custom cage with bread racks on the other hand, I would probably prefer tower cases. They are easier to cool, and actually end up using less power due to fewer/slower fans. There is also higher tolerance for fan failures, as the extra space in the chassis may still provide enough of a gradient to cool adequately. With all other components (motherboard, etc. ) being the same, and being able to achieve the same overall density (in terms of number of servers per square foot), towers are markedly advantageous.ASTUTE INTERNET: Advanced, customized, and scalable solutions with AS54527 Premium Performance and Canadian Optimized Network (Level3, Shaw, CogecoPeer1, GTT/Tinet),
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07-04-2009, 10:16 PM #7Web Hosting Master
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As a customer, I dont care if its branded or not. Ive seen a lot of tower servers that performed great, even outperformed branded servers. I would get or signup with a company providing a decent tower server spec with cost lower than a branded one.
All things work together for the good of those who love God - Romans 8:28
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07-04-2009, 10:29 PM #8WHT Addict
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07-04-2009, 10:50 PM #9Web Hosting Master
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Completely agree.
Towers are usually not as efficient or pretty but usually meet the same need. The cost-savings is hard to figure up as a custom built tower is very cheap to build. The power it consumes is usually more expensive but the question is how long it takes to get the ROI.
Buy a more expensive rack server, use less power.
Build a cheap tower, use more power.
How long does it take? Additionally, space is a huge issue when it comes to big business but theoretically, the amount of tower servers you can stack in a rack, may come close to equaling out on rack servers if you consider cooling by sq. foot.
Very difficult decision but I'd say if you are buying good hardware, usually you don't have the amount of headaches. In many cases, we use HP DL380 G4's/G5's and Sun X4150/4170's and although we get a contract, we rarely ever need it.
On the other hand, we lease servers in several datacenters and they are tower servers, custom built. We *rarely* ever run into problems on those either.
The biggest problem comes from cheap hardware. Whether the system is a tower or rack or even a custom-built rack server. Stay away from cheap manufacturers and it doesn't matter if it's a blade or a 12u $285,000 system. You can get good hardware or bad hardware, the real cost savings is usually from bringing the builds in-house.
The other big thing is when buying hardware, make sure it's recognizable cross-platform. Don't buy the offbrand el-cheapo NIC card for $4.00. Get something that even if it isn't top of the line, it's generic enough to work on BSD/Solaris/Red Hat/SUSE/Windows 2003/2008. If you have something that works for each of those then you have a config that should work anywhere.
Although, if you build it then you have to support it and work with hardware vendors, RMA's etc...
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07-04-2009, 10:56 PM #10WHT Addict
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07-04-2009, 11:13 PM #11Web Hosting Master
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07-04-2009, 11:21 PM #12WHT Addict
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Oh and they were pretty cheap too. But worked in anything. I still see security companies with proprietary systems using them. You can get them still for a decent price
http://cgi.ebay.com/Lot-of-140-3COM-... 3A1|294%3A50
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07-05-2009, 12:06 AM #13Web Hosting Master
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07-05-2009, 01:39 AM #14Web Hosting Master
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I'd have to disagree here. Why would a rackmount chassis use less power, when it has more, and higher speed fans?
Wholeheartedly agree there. I don't understand why so many people like Dell, when it is at best aggressively mediocre, and sometimes just lousy hardware. Sun/IBM/HP are so much nicer, and Supermicro offers similar or better hardware quality for cheaper.ASTUTE INTERNET: Advanced, customized, and scalable solutions with AS54527 Premium Performance and Canadian Optimized Network (Level3, Shaw, CogecoPeer1, GTT/Tinet),
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07-06-2009, 03:24 AM #15Aspiring Evangelist
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Dell prices seem to have gone up, while HP has slightly dropped.
Not that Dell has even done anything good to back this price raise.
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07-06-2009, 10:56 AM #16Retired Moderator
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I love Dell hardware. In corporate datacenters they offer better support than a Supermicro and will do deep discounting hoping to win your desktop business. Sun/IBM/HP(Compaq - I miss you) are also excellent.
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