HPE Servers in Selectel

Today, on the Selectel blog, a guest post - Alexey Pavlov, technical consultant at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), will tell about his experience using Selectel services. We give him the floor.

The best way to check the quality of a service is to use it yourself. Our customers are increasingly considering the option of placing part of their resources in the data center with the provider. The customer’s understandable desire to deal with familiar and proven platforms, but in a more convenient self-service portal format.

Selectel recently launched a new HPE server service for its customers. And here the question arises: which server is more accessible? Which stands in your office / data center or at the provider?

Recall the issues that customers solve by comparing the traditional approach and the model of equipment rental from the provider.

1. How quickly do you agree on a budget and you can order a configuration of equipment for the pilot launch of your brainchild?
2. Where to find a place for equipment. Do not put the server under the table?
3. The complexity of the hardware stack is growing. Where can I find extra hours in a day to figure everything out?

The answer to such and similar questions has long been: ask the service provider for help. Earlier, I had never been able to order equipment rental services from Selectel, but here I even managed to test and describe everything in detail:

All applications are made through the portal where you can choose the service of interest.


You can choose ready-made server configurations, there are a lot of options. Previously, such models were called “fixed” configurations. They are chosen when it is known exactly what is needed, and during operation it is not necessary to change the configuration. The server is already assembled and mounted in the data center in advance.


It’s convenient to search by location, ruler or by predefined tags. If ready-made configurations are not enough, you can assemble the model of interest.

Each server of arbitrary configuration is assembled individually for the order. The site has a configurator that helps build a server with all compatible components. There is scope for creativity! Under the agreement, servers of arbitrary configuration are leased to customers up to 5 business days.

In my case, the order was made on Friday night, on Saturday at 8:00 I got access to the server console.


Many customers are accustomed to working with HPE line of servers for various reasons, for example, a wide selection of available certified options for SAP HANA, MS SQL, Oracle and other industrial software. Now these servers have appeared in the Selectel portfolio:


To effectively deploy such applications, the company must have sufficient resources. When contacting the customer, we design the whole solution, and not separately the software and server. Together with our customers, we discuss reference architectures and configurations developed by software and hardware manufacturers, complete the complete configuration, scale and size, all specifications and deployment information.

HPE develops these reference solutions as part of a program that covers many different configurations that any service provider can use as a ready-made, tested template for further deployment to a customer’s project.

Benchmarks

One of the advantages of the HPE server selection approach is testing them for various benchmarks. So you can choose a configuration for a predetermined load: database volumes, number of users, performance.

HPE DL380 Gen10 servers have 4 TPC-H (Transaction Processing Council Ad-hoc / decision support benchmark) records among all servers.

Such certificates allow you to evaluate the performance of the system in a given configuration as part of the test and roughly compare it with the expected characteristics in the upcoming project.

Interesting: the Microsoft SQL Server product, starting from version 2016, was developed as a cloud product, it was tested in the Azure service on more than 20 sites with billions of queries per day, this is another reason why such systems should be run in the provider's data centers.

“It is also perhaps the world's only relational database to be“ born cloud-first, ”with the majority of features first deployed and tested in Azure, across 22 global datacenters and billions of requests per day. It is customer tested and battle ready. ” (Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft)

The HPE portfolio includes dedicated server solutions that have been tested for a variety of industrial platforms. For example, HPE DL380 Gen10 servers, which can be used as the “building foundation” in the infrastructure. They showed excellent results in tests for SQL 2017, with the lowest cost for QphH (Query-per-Hour Performance) for September 2018: 0.46 USD per QphH @ 3000GB.

Work with databases

What interesting features does the DL380 Gen10 server have for working with SQL?

HPE DL380 Gen10 supports Persistent Memory technology, which provides bitwise memory access, which reduces latency and increases the number of transactions by 41%. Testing results for such configurations are publicly available .


NVDIMM technology allows you to work with a huge number of I / O queues - 64k, unlike SAS and SATA with 254 queues. Another important advantage is the low latency - 3-8 times lower than that of the SSD.

Similar test results are available for Oracle and Microsoft Exchange systems .

In addition to NVDIMM technology, Intel Optane devices are actively used in the arsenal of database acceleration tools, which can be tested in Selectel on HPE equipment. Preliminary test results were published on the Selectel blog.

Features and Technology

The HPE Proliant Gen10 server has several unique technologies that make it stand out from other servers.

First of all, security. HPE introduced Run-Time Firmware Verification, a technology that allows the server to check the firmware signature for its origin before installing it on the server, this avoids spoofing it or installing the root-kit (malware).

Processor types

HPE ProLiant Gen10 is available with five CPU categories:

• Platinum (8100, 8200 series) for ERP, analytics in memory, OLAP, virtualization, containers;
• Gold (6100/5100, 6200/5200 series) for OLTP, analytics, AI, Hadoop / SPARK, Java, VDI, HPC, virtualization and containers;
• Silver (4100, 4200 series) for SMB loads, web front-end, network and storage applications;
• Bronze (3100, 3200 series) for SMB loads.

For all customers, in addition to this, there are a number of innovations in Gen10 servers:

Workload Matching - automatic adjustment of all server parameters to a specific type of load, for example, SQL. The measured results show a difference in performance compared to the usual settings of up to 9%, which is quite good for customers who want to get the most out of their server.

Jitter Smoothing - preserving the set processor frequency without spurious peaks after turning on Turbo Boost, ideal for customers who need to work at higher frequencies with minimal delays.

Core Boosting - allows you to get an increase in the frequency of the processor, reducing overhead. Ideal for customers using kernel-licensed software such as Oracle. The technology allows you to use fewer cores, but with a higher frequency.

Work with memory

• Advanced ECC / SDDC : memory error checking and correction (ECC), combined with single device data correction (SDDC), ensures the continued operation of the application in the event of a DRAM failure. The firmware of the server removes the failed DRAM of the entire memory card and restores the data in the new address space.
• Demand scrubbing : overwrites the corrected data into memory after recovering the corrected error.
• Patrol scrubbing : proactive search and correction of correctable errors in memory. Patrol and demand scrubbing work together to prevent the accumulation of correctable errors and reduce the possibility of unplanned downtime.
• Isolation of a failed DIMM : Identifying a failed DIMM allows the user to replace only a failed DIMM.

Learn more about the technologies used on the HPE website .

Selectel Control Panel

I managed to work with the Selectel order panel - a very pleasant feeling, the navigation is simple, it is clear where, what is located.

It is possible to control all traffic from the server, assign an IP address:



Various OSs are available for installation, installation starts automatically:



After installation, go to the KVM console and continue to work in the usual mode, as if we were right next to the server:



According to analysts, more than half of all small and medium-sized businesses transfer at least part of the infrastructure to service providers. Large customers have entire departments responsible for working with service providers.

With Selectel, solving business problems is easier, and there are several reasons:

1. Solving problems with financing difficulties (for the purchase of equipment and the construction of their own infrastructure).
2. The infrastructure is ready, accelerating the launch of the product on the market.
3. The help of qualified specialists is always at hand.
4. It is easy to scale the infrastructure, start with simple configurations and then flexibly adapt the systems to the needs of the business.
5. Modern technologies are available for testing with pre-tested configurations for any application and any load.
6. HPE tested and well-proven Enterprise solutions are available in a wide variety of configurations.

List of references:

• Persistent Memory Technologies at HPE
• Intel Optane Storage