xByte R720XD Video
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Hello all,
Another video from xByte featuring Dell's R720XD.
Please let us know what you think.
Thanks,
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I love that machine. The R720xd is a pinnacle of the Dell line for the past decade. It just hit the sweet spot for so many use cases.
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OK looking at this machine and considering the C@C situation, how many windows at the BigDog sever level could it support? and what is the cost of that box?
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@Dashrender said:
OK looking at this machine and considering the C@C situation, how many windows at the BigDog sever level could it support? and what is the cost of that box?
Depends on the config. But probably 60 - 80 at a rough guess.
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The OS that you choose, the hypervisor that you choose, those things matter a lot. Run XenServer with fully paravirtualized Linux clients and you might get 100 or more!
Run HyperV and Windows clients, 60 will be more realistic.
You can get a LOT on there, but at what level of acceptable performance is really the question. Getting 120 - 150 might be feasible, but you probably would not be very happy with the performance.
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@scottalanmiller That's a higher number than I'd have expected! What do you end up bottle necking first? Probably storage? Even SSD?
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller That's a higher number than I'd have expected! What do you end up bottle necking first? Probably storage? Even SSD?
Totally depends. If you max out the box it will really come down to usage. If you are doing a lot of writes, the storage IO will bottleneck as there is only 1GB total read/write memory cache to absorb the writes heading to the spindles. But if you load it with 24 15K drives on RAID 10, that's a lot of write that it can handle. But one massive database will punish it. But a thousand web servers will not.
Network throughput would likely be your first bottleneck. But if you are doing a lot of computation, it could easily be CPU getting hit first, but not likely. Top end Intel CPUs in that unit is a LOT of CPU power.
Memory is a raw 256GB, so that is 511 Dev1 units without any memory compression at all. (512MB held back for the hypervisor.) Add compression and under utilization and getting into the 1,000 range can be done.
Things like "all the same OS" for every instance on the hardware does a lot for compression.
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@scottalanmiller Fascinating! I need to get some certs and work towards getting into a datacenter. This stuff really gets me going!
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Now VERY few people would want to push that density. But you certainly can.
And this is just a dual socket system. Imagine a quad socket or bigger!
And then look at non-Intel systems. The density that you can get on Power or Sparc systems is insane.
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@scottalanmiller EHEHehehehehe
Ever play with any of the AMD servers that Dell put out? I am curious about the opterons - can't seem to get them from xbyte so I am guessing they were never that popular.
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No, but we use AMB-based HPs (DL385 series) exclusively for our HP fleet so we are very used to the Opterons. We've been big fans for a long time.
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Dell's AMD line was never very big. Although the R715, I believe, was a nice unit.
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I was spec'ing one a couple years ago and yeah the R715/515 were VERY competitively priced - always wondered how they performed. Glad to see they're working for ya
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They vary a little. AMD is better for threading, Intel is better for single thread performance. AMD tends to work quite nicely for average virtualization workloads. These days Intel is in the lead. But AMD makes an excellent product and was the leader for a very long time in the AMD64 world (that we have been in since 2003.)
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Good video, thanks!
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This is pretty much the only server I plan to buy in the near future. Likely from X-Byte. I do not have a client in need for another year or two unless I pull in a new client (always looking). So it may be a different model by then, but still.
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@JaredBusch said:
This is pretty much the only server I plan to buy in the near future. Likely from X-Byte. I do not have a client in need for another year or two unless I pull in a new client (always looking). So it may be a different model by then, but still.
Same, we are looking at another host in the next two months. I will probably work through XByte to get one of these.
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I want to know if xbyte ever gets in old stuff thats still virtualization compatible that we can buy for cheap home server setups and testing labs.
My dream is to get a really basic 2 socket server with 32gb of ram and room for 8+ SATA drives for a couple hundred bucks. Right now you can still beat xbyte's PE2950 with brand new consumer grade stuff (ok, it won't have a proper RAID controller but it's half the price)
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Ok, half the price was exaggerated but here:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/4sCbZL
$600 brand new parts, 8 core AMD 32gb ramhttp://www.xbyte.com/ProductDesc.aspx?code=>2950II&type=3
$900, Dual E5345 4 cores each, 32gb ram, perc6i -
@MattSpeller said:
I want to know if xbyte ever gets in old stuff thats still virtualization compatible that we can buy for cheap home server setups and testing labs.
My dream is to get a really basic 2 socket server with 32gb of ram and room for 8+ SATA drives for a couple hundred bucks. Right now you can still beat xbyte's PE2950 with brand new consumer grade stuff (ok, it won't have a proper RAID controller but it's half the price)
They definitely do. The Rx1x lines (two gen old) are quite cheap already and you can get a little older than that. Hunt around their site, you'll find stuff.
