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SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

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Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#71

Post by phreanix »

lsc wrote: post #39
wenbert wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.

Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.

You could try their forums.

http://webgeekph.com/ http://www.philweavers.net/forums/

Or here:

http://webdesigners.org.ph/

Most of the time, the best way to access the best people is thru referrals. Drop me an email, I might be able to help you out.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#72

Post by bnoordhuis »

lsc wrote: post #34
astrodust wrote: post #6

I hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.

eventually, maybe; but right now there just isn't very much price pressure in the VPS industry. Personally, I won't touch any hardware until I can get it from more than one vendor (usually, until you get to that point it's too expensive. Their may not be much price pressure in the industry as a whole, but in my niche, there certainly is.)

  right now there just isn't very much price pressure in the VPS industry
Isn't that the point? Right now, there isn't much of a margin left to undercut competitors with unless you scale up to Amazon or Rackspace size. Developments like this could change that again.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#73

Post by lsc »

bnoordhuis wrote: post #72
lsc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eventually, maybe; but right now there just isn't very much price pressure in the VPS industry. Personally, I won't touch any hardware until I can get it from more than one vendor (usually, until you get to that point it's too expensive. Their may not be much price pressure in the industry as a whole, but in my niche, there certainly is.)

right now there just isn't very much price pressure in the VPS industry Isn't that the point? Right now, there isn't much of a margin left to undercut competitors with unless you scale up to Amazon or Rackspace size. Developments like this could change that again.

look at my previous post; this is actually a good bit more expensive than 32gib ram/8 core opteron pizza boxes.

People keep telling me that margins are low in this industry. I mean, my prices are dramatically lower than others, and I imagine my my internal processes are rather a lot less efficient than the competition (we provision by hand, for example) also, we're not nearly at scale; I mean, we have 4 full racks and maybe 15Kw of power capacity total- I'm not making a lot of money, but I'm afloat on 1/2 the revenue and higher internal costs.

I mean, if you'll pay my bills, I'll pretty much do it for fun, so I'd expect my margins to be lower than most, but considering the price differences, some people must be making some serious coin.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#74

Post by bnoordhuis »

lsc wrote: post #35
arvinjoar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rethink that if I were you. What if you started to provide virtual private servers on one of these boxes instead of offering colocation? I think this innovation makes VPS solutions even more efficient than they are today.

ECC is a huge thing in that case. The thing about being a VPS provider is that if your hardware chokes, your customers notice, and they get pissed. Sure, if you are running some kind of web farm you set it up so that things keep running without interruption if you lose a server. But if you provide VPS hosting and you lose a server? People notice, and they will be pissed. If you are a VPS provider and you loose custom…

I've seen ECC mentioned a few times in this thread but how relevant is it really? At my old job we used both regular COTS hardware from Dell and HP and high-performance gear from SUN, often at four times the price. The latter had ECC memory and, if memory serves, shielded CPUs but I never noticed much difference in stability or performance when compared to regular hardware. If someone has some numbers on this, I'd love to see them.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#75

Post by lsc »

phreanix wrote: post #71
lsc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.

You could try their forums. http://webgeekph.com/ http://www.philweavers.net/forums/ Or here: http://webdesigners.org.ph/ Most of the time, the best way to access the best people is thru referrals. Drop me an email, I might be able to help you out.

Thanks. I've never used referrals, though. Usually I prefer cheap display ads, donating services, or community participation. I have used discounts for certain low-risk groups; I guess that's a little like a referral.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#76

Post by lsc »

bnoordhuis wrote: post #74
lsc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC is a huge thing in that case. The thing about being a VPS provider is that if your hardware chokes, your customers notice, and they get pissed. Sure, if you are running some kind of web farm you set it up so that things keep running without interruption if you lose a server. But if you provide VPS hosting and you lose a server? People notice, and they will be pissed. If you are a VPS provider and you loose custom…

I've seen ECC mentioned a few times in this thread but how relevant is it really? At my old job we used both regular COTS hardware from Dell and HP and high-performance gear from SUN, often at four times the price. The latter had ECC memory and, if memory serves, shielded CPUs but I never noticed much difference in stability or performance when compared to regular hardware. If someone has some numbers on this, I'd lo…

if your dell and HP kit was server grade, it almost certainly had ECC ram. before nehalam, it was almost impossible to get dual-cpu servers that would support non-ecc ram. Even today, now that unbuffered ram is supported (buffering and ECC are not the same thing, but it's unusual to see registered or buffered ram that is not also ECC) nearly all server hardware you get from the likes of dell or HP is going to default to using ECC ram.

The big deal with ECC is that with non-ecc ram, you don't know when in-ram data was corrupted. If you have a bad bit of ram that is being used for our journaling/disk caching, it's pretty easy to corrupt your data.

If you've got ECC, it corrects single bit errors, and logs that there was a problem, and it can be configured to crash on double bit errors, rather than just silently corrupting your data.

If you use non-ecc ram, not only will bad ram silently corrupt your data, and sometimes crash your server, but there will be no indicator (other than random crashes) that the problem is in fact bad ram.

You can get away with not having ecc in large server farms if you have lots of checksums on generated data... but in a VPS type situation where people get pissed if you loose a single server, it's sure to end in tears.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#77

Post by WilliamLP »

limist wrote: post #36

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...

I think I can afford to wait until people start proving undeniably (through out-competing rivals) that Scala and Clojure have any pragmatic benefit in real multicore programming tasks. Anything that mentions Fibonacci numbers doesn't count, nor do easily parallelizable problems commonly handled in C/C++ (ray tracing, media encoding, web servers, etc.) It needs to be something not trivially broken up into independent parts.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#79

Post by drhodes »

WilliamLP wrote: post #77
limist wrote: post #36

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...

I think I can afford to wait until people start proving undeniably (through out-competing rivals) that Scala and Clojure have any pragmatic benefit in real multicore programming tasks. Anything that mentions Fibonacci numbers doesn't count, nor do easily parallelizable problems commonly handled in C/C++ (ray tracing, media encoding, web servers, etc.) It needs to be something not trivially broken up into independent…

While this isn't undeniable proof, it's interesting none the less, Simon Peyton Jones: Data Parallel Haskell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8

He talks about how this scheme can parallelize non-trivial data structures, and how tedious book keeping can be avoided. I haven't used it yet in a project, so I can't speak of its efficacy - but worth a watch, imho.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#80

Post by runT1ME »

DEinspanjer wrote: post #58

I worked with one of these prototype boxes. I was using it for something a bit outside their common use case: clustered ETL processing of log data. I was quite happy with the performance. In the workloads I had that needed lots of threads, I was able to use the box to spin up a lot of nodes and crunch through several hundred GB of log data very quickly. The machines were easy to work with since they felt like normal…

I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine, or is it a 'cluster' in the sense that each node has a single processor? (You used both threads and inter-process, but also implied multiple nodes...)
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