Dell Opteron Servers

reaper87

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The company i am employeed at has grown a coniderable amount over the past 6 months, and our dual-socket xeon webserver/database isnt cutting it anymore. The plan is going to be to switch over to a cluster array with 3-4 servers(depending on preformance) attached to a large NAS.

Ive always been a hardware enthuiast, and know about the preformance per watt advantage Opterons offer. Sadly, my only choice is dell. Does anyone have a aproximate date that dell will be releasing its Opteron servers? Or whether or not dell will be offering the new Core based server chips near the chips release date? It seems as if the xeons are preforming slower ever day, so this needs to be done asap! Thanks.
 

Caboose-1

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The company i am employeed at has grown a coniderable amount over the past 6 months, and our dual-socket xeon webserver/database isnt cutting it anymore. The plan is going to be to switch over to a cluster array with 3-4 servers(depending on preformance) attached to a large NAS.

Ive always been a hardware enthuiast, and know about the preformance per watt advantage Opterons offer. Sadly, my only choice is dell. Does anyone have a aproximate date that dell will be releasing its Opteron servers? Or whether or not dell will be offering the new Core based server chips near the chips release date? It seems as if the xeons are preforming slower ever day, so this needs to be done asap! Thanks.
I'm with those two, Woodcrest is your answer. As to Dell being bad, they actually most of the time make quality products. The worst thing about them is there support. It might be better for servers, but I have heard Dell is famous for bad Technical Support.
 

voxel

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Sadly, my only choice is dell.

Very sad indeed. HP is leaps and bound a better company with better products overall for business. And they are CPU agnostic.

Dell is the Wal-Mart of computer-tech.
 

Caboose-1

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Sadly, my only choice is dell.

Very sad indeed. HP is leaps and bound a better company with better products overall for business. And they are CPU agnostic.

Dell is the Wal-Mart of computer-tech. No, Dell is the Qwik-E-Mart of the computer industry.
 

K8MAN

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The company i am employeed at has grown a coniderable amount over the past 6 months, and our dual-socket xeon webserver/database isnt cutting it anymore. The plan is going to be to switch over to a cluster array with 3-4 servers(depending on preformance) attached to a large NAS.

Ive always been a hardware enthuiast, and know about the preformance per watt advantage Opterons offer. Sadly, my only choice is dell. Does anyone have a aproximate date that dell will be releasing its Opteron servers? Or whether or not dell will be offering the new Core based server chips near the chips release date? It seems as if the xeons are preforming slower ever day, so this needs to be done asap! Thanks.
I'm with those two, Woodcrest is your answer. As to Dell being bad, they actually most of the time make quality products. The worst thing about them is there support. It might be better for servers, but I have heard Dell is famous for bad Technical Support.
[opinion]
To be honest Dell's reputation for bad support is not helped by the fact that most Americas's get offended whenever they hear a foreign accent. I've even had American's go on a rant about foreigner's taking their job's when I tell them I'm from Canada. Talk about ignorance.
[/opinion]
 

pengwin

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Sadly, my only choice is dell.

Very sad indeed. HP is leaps and bound a better company with better products overall for business. And they are CPU agnostic.

Dell is the Wal-Mart of computer-tech.


mmmm, HP is MUCH BETTER THAN DELL

if u can grab the same product at dell and HP and HP is a little more get HP
 

the_vorlon

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The company i am employeed at has grown a coniderable amount over the past 6 months, and our dual-socket xeon webserver/database isnt cutting it anymore. The plan is going to be to switch over to a cluster array with 3-4 servers(depending on preformance) attached to a large NAS.

Ive always been a hardware enthuiast, and know about the preformance per watt advantage Opterons offer. Sadly, my only choice is dell. Does anyone have a aproximate date that dell will be releasing its Opteron servers? Or whether or not dell will be offering the new Core based server chips near the chips release date? It seems as if the xeons are preforming slower ever day, so this needs to be done asap! Thanks.

Looks like Woodcrest is a real winner.

But don't tell Dell that.....

I don't know how it will be with Woodcrest, but about 8 months ago I needed a few servers and talked with my friendly Dell "corporate account manager" (is that Dell speak for "salesmen"?) and gently suggested I might want to look at some opterons as well...

The Dell folks basically gave me the new servers, as in the cost of the Ram, Motherboard and operating systems exceeds what we paid for them by a goodly margin...

They are adaquate for what I need, they also threw in a 5 year onsite warranty.

If the server is lightly loaded, the Dell's are fine, just make sure you beat the &*&^%^ out of them to get a really good price...
 

reaper87

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Based on benchmarks, recomendations, etc, woodcrest is the way to go. The only concern i still have is the scalibility. The great thing about clusters is the ability to add a new server as the demand comes. I dont plan on using 3 servers forever, and will eventually need to add more. Of all 3+ previews i have read, scalibility is not discussed. The opterons are draw much of there fame from the ease of scalibility. Does anyone have a information based on that; im not sure whether or not the new architecture of core 2 will offer any more advantages over Xeon, or how close it can come to opteron. A link wold be great to, if one exists. thanks.
 

johngoodwin

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The company i am employeed at has grown a coniderable amount over the past 6 months, and our dual-socket xeon webserver/database isnt cutting it anymore. The plan is going to be to switch over to a cluster array with 3-4 servers(depending on preformance) attached to a large NAS.

You might also want to run your applications through a profiler. Depending on the database, there are many tools out there. If you don't properly profile your applications, you may end up buying a more expensive system to only get a marginal increase in performance.

If you need specific help, provide specifics on what technologies are used on and against your database server. It's possible some application you are running on it, or against it is just plain not scalable, or perhaps your queries are poorly formed (performance wise).

John
 

theboomboomcars

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Opterons are good at scaling with processors in a system, as in going from a 2p to a 4p to an 8p, etc. With clustering they are connected through the network and not the HTT, at least currently, HTT v3 is supposed to bring an external link which will allow for motherboards to be connected together at the full HTT speed.
But for now the platform doesn't matter for clustering, the OS does.
 

9-inch

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The company i am employeed at has grown a coniderable amount over the past 6 months, and our dual-socket xeon webserver/database isnt cutting it anymore. The plan is going to be to switch over to a cluster array with 3-4 servers(depending on preformance) attached to a large NAS.

Ive always been a hardware enthuiast, and know about the preformance per watt advantage Opterons offer. Sadly, my only choice is dell. Does anyone have a aproximate date that dell will be releasing its Opteron servers? Or whether or not dell will be offering the new Core based server chips near the chips release date? It seems as if the xeons are preforming slower ever day, so this needs to be done asap! Thanks.

Wait for Dell to offer Socket-F Opteron servers. These will be bandwidth monsters compared to s940 and will clearly outperform woodcrest.
 

9-inch

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Do we have an aprox. release date for the socket f's?

The reason why I believe AMD moved the release date of Socket-F to late july-august makes me believe that DELL and HP are buying all of them.
Expect servers on socket-F during that time period.
 

linux_0

Splendid
Aye, Socket-F is what you want, your 2nd best choice is S940.

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H8501_Diagram_Large2.jpg


I would suggest:

0. custom

1. Penguin Computing

2. HP

3. other

255. Dell
 

Artmic

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Caboose-1 said:
As to Dell being bad, they actually most of the time make quality products. The worst thing about them is there support. It might be better for servers, but I have heard Dell is famous for bad Technical Support.

The only bad thing about their server support is a lot of the time they switch you over to India, and 50 percent of the time i can't understand what the guy is saying on the phone, his accent is bad, the phone line itself is bad, hardly can hear him, but hey, DELL is saving money ;) lol I guess it costs too much for english speaking Americans to have tech support jobs