DDR3 or DDR4? Why did we offer the Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps for $ 99 in the Netherlands?
More than two years have passed since we started providing Dell R730xd platforms in the Netherlands at very low prices - from $ 249 / month (2 times lower than the average market), because in the purchase, even now, when the latest generation of processors E5-2650 v4 are announced manufacturer of end of life, they cost 8500 euros + 21% VAT = 10285 euros (payback period 5.7 years, if you take into account the cost of colocation and traffic and do not take into account the cost of support costs):
We have successfully implemented on these platforms many cluster solutions for our business subscribers, as well as individual users. We developed and successfully launched an additional product for sale - virtual servers with dedicated drives, which made it possible to replace the initial line of dedicated servers and provide VPS servers with 10-40GB DDR4 RAM resources, 6-24 E5-2650 v4 cores, and most importantly - 1- 4 fully dedicated 4TB HDD or 240-480GB SSD drives. We described in detail the advantages and disadvantages of this product here: The whole truth about VPS (KVM) E5-2650 v4 (6 Cores) 10GB DDR4 240GB SSD 1Gbps from $ 20 or how to divide the server correctly? (options with RAID1 and RAID10 are available).
And everything seems to be fine, we fulfilled the sales plan, sold even more than planned, thousands of users bought our virtual solutions, so we almost completely got rid of outdated servers with E3-1230 and E5620 processors, which were ordered by those subscribers who didn’t could afford the Dell R730xd, although we made it as cheap as possible. After all, now they were able to afford to say just such a VPS (KVM) - E5-2650 v4 (24 Cores) 40GB DDR4 with 4x240GB RAID10 SSD or 4x4TB RAID10 HDD 1Gbps 40TB at the price of the same E3-1230. What is not a good replacement for the obsolete E3-1230 with the same set of disks? Or they even chose the option with 2 times less resources (when so many resources were not required), and saved more than half the budget. As a result, we not only reduced the cost of electricity and maintenance,
However, we could not satisfy the needs of a small part of subscribers. After all, it was impossible to create a full-fledged virtual environment in an existing virtual environment (although certain tricks were used for this in the form of Dockers and other things) + RAM “only” up to 40GB (this problem was partially fixed by the NVM product), there is no way to choose the required RAID level or increase the volume of SSD quotas, while on 2 units we actually placed only 3 clients. In general, there were drawbacks, the solution is not for everyone.
Maybe I’ll open my eyes to someone, but in the Netherlands, most large data centers do not have their own hardware, due to the huge taxes that arise when owning and buying it. Everything is in a long-term (ten-year contract or more) lease from the manufacturer (Dell, HP, Supermicro). Which greatly limits the possibilities. Indeed, in order to ensure an extremely low cost, we had to abandon the whole zoo of configurations and sign one, the most effective platform for everyone. And we used the capabilities of the platform to the maximum, provided the needs of more than 95% of subscribers.
But they could not completely solve the problem.Yes, and the current "more than 95%" of customers are not against improvements. Of course, to put one more configuration is not difficult, but the whole question is in price. How do we compete with the offers of large low-costers, while offering the highest quality and high-end hardware at the same or lower price?
In January of this year, we opened our European representative office SIA UA-Hosting in Latvia for this. This not only increased the convenience of working with us for business subscribers, but also allowed us to start returning VAT on purchases, which also significantly reduced the price. After some time, we will definitely share our experience. There will be a detailed separate article on how to simply register now in Europe instead of Belize, and how difficult it is to open a bank account in the country of registration, even having all the necessary documents for this. None of the help companies will now offer you a bank account in Latvia for a Latvian company, everyone will offer Switzerland and will want 4,000 euros only for help with opening an account, which will not be especially convenient subsequently,
But today we continue about iron. We thought for a long time what 1U solution to offer. Which server can fully satisfy the needs of 5% of customers and significantly expand the capabilities of current ones?
For several months we thought, chose, evaluated. Compare cost-effective for you. Of course, nothing better than the Dell R730xd yet :) Otherwise, we would not continue to offer these solutions, and by the way, we started to do this with updated processors that are Tetradeca Core, not Dodeca, that is, 14 full-fledged cores in each processor , 28 taking into account hyper-trading, and even with frequencies of 2.6 GHz, instead of 2.2, they even decided to lower the price by placing the equipment at the same time in the more expensive data center in Amsterdam , but basically offering only 64GB DDR4 RAM, not 128, because not everyone needs so much:
Dell R730xd - 2x E5-2697v3 2.6GHz 14С 64GB DDR4 4x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - $ 199 / month, however, when paying for 2 years, monthly and when paying for a year it will be more expensive, however, see what beauty:
We use Fortigate to arrange secure access each client to the iDrac leased server. Thanks to Forticlient, you have access to the internal network, and the rest of your traffic will not go through the VPN tunnel, only traffic to the internal network will go through it, which is very convenient, unlike a regular VPN. We include all servers to two independent PDUs (we do not save on sockets):
Each rack-mount switch is connected by 2x10G fiber links to distribution switches, the traffic from which is routed by two independent data center cores. That is, we not only gave the price 2 times lower than the market price, but also gave the premium network at the same price. Internet traffic is delivered by Tier I transit providers such as GTT and NTT, because connectivity without reservation costs about 7,000 euros for 10G in the data center directly, but we provide 2N at a price more than 2 times cheaper, each additional gigabit is $ 450 . Yes, of course, this price implies that not every customer will consume their limit fully, which is why we "risked" to give such a price. Statistics - many years of real experience. 500 servers with a gigabit connection and a traffic limit of 100 TB consume an average of about 20 Gbit / s (and not 160-200 Gbit / s, as you might think), such is the real data. Of course, subscribers who initially consume a lot when ordering Unmetered are not taken into account. It’s just that not everyone really consumes their 100 TB, which is why we are not afraid to sell people traffic at prices lower than that at which the transit provider lets out connectivity.
Among other things, for our subscribers we provide 1G or 10G LAN, as well as IP addresses from RU GEO or NL networks and the ability to use hardware firewall, private switches. Nevertheless, despite the fact that we offered servers at a price more than 2 times lower than the market, and taking into account the premium network, 3-4 times lower than the market, the above part of the clients who cannot afford such a server, and VPS (a third of the physical server) does not suit for various reasons.
We have been choosing the best configuration for a long time, because we still wanted to offer the “newest”, but at the same time cost-effective, and came to the conclusion that we would better give 128GB DDR3 RAM than 64GB DDR4. Why?
- working at the same frequency of 2400 MHz, the memory strips DDR3 and DDR4 show comparable results;
- latency for DDR4 in this case is 15 nanoseconds, and for DDR3 it is 11 nanoseconds, that is, at these frequencies, DDR3 memory is also “faster” in terms of delay;
- any advantages of DDR4 begin to be noticeable only at frequencies above 3000 MHz, which not every user needs, sometimes latency is more important.
The difference between DDR3-2133 and DDR4-2133 is practically insignificant for a number of applications, including for cases of video conversion. DDR3 is faster in more than half the cases.
And since our goal was to offer a low-cost platform, but at the same time cost-effective, we decided to try to provide the following option in the Netherlands at a price of $ 99 / month (at a VPS price):
Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - you can order here
First we want to study the demand, ask you if we were wrong? Already, we have installed for you several such platforms in a rack for 1U servers (and we still have standardization in order not to mix different platforms in one rack in view of the efficient use of network equipment and power) and we are finishing its construction:
The configurations support up to 8 SSD drives and up to 2 PCIe NVMe (if you need a 10G network, then one drive, since a dual-port 10G card will occupy one of the ports). We decided not to provide power-consuming and slow HDDs with this configuration, but to provide two Samsung 960GB (MZ7LH960HAJR) at a good price. When paying for a server for a period of one year or more, additional drives are 2 times cheaper, only + $ 25 / month for a drive. Yes, for $ 249 / month you can get almost 8 TB of SSD quotas and a good Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6С 128GB DDR3 8x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB server.
An additional 1x3.2TB PCI-E Samsung PM1725b SSD will cost a lot ≈ + $ 250 / month (we should at least earn some money not for 5.7 years), but discounts are possible with long-term leases. Why do we install and offer only such drives, and not NVMe hot-swap M2? These drives are still better, latency is many times less due to the connection of PCI-E. It is these drives that are used, say, by banks, or by customers using some kind of processing. M2 is much less effective for these tasks. And although there are 1.6 TB and 6.4 TB volume drives on the market, the reason for not using them is simple. In the case of 1.6 TB, the volume is too small, the PCI-E slots can be exhausted quickly, and in the case of 6.4 TB, the recovery process will take too much time, because 3.2 TB was deservedly chosen as the “golden mean”.
We also pay important attention to such a thing as cabeling. After all, the way the north will be cooled and the energy consumption that occurs as a result of this process depends on the beauty of cable laying. By collecting cables in groups, we reduce the “blocking” area in the path of hot air and it more efficiently dissipates from the racks, as turbulence that interferes with efficient heat dissipation is reduced.
In general, I believe the configuration was a success. Nevertheless, we are ready to listen to criticism about this proposal from the readers of Habr, because very often, expressing opinions, you directed us on the right path , and we are interested in providing you with the most effective solutions in the future. Thank you in advance for this!The offer is limited in quantity and at the moment we have 16 servers in the Netherlands. I do not exclude that in the future, the price of new orders may become higher, but now you have a great chance to design a server at an incredibly low price (in fact, at the cost of colocation, in view of all the described advantages).
It goes without saying that for Habr users a nice bonus is +1 month for free, when paying for Dell R420 for a period of 3 months (to receive a bonus, just leave the order number here in the comments and be a registered Habr user). Thus, you have the opportunity to work for the first 4 months at a price of $ 119, evaluate the quality, and then switch to a two-year payment cycle, paying for the service for 2 years and receiving a unique price of $ 99 / month for the server!
We work with physical. persons and jur. by persons from the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the rest of the world under an agreement, agreements are concluded between us (SIA UA-Hosting, Latvia) and your company. Address, we will be glad to cooperate!
We have successfully implemented on these platforms many cluster solutions for our business subscribers, as well as individual users. We developed and successfully launched an additional product for sale - virtual servers with dedicated drives, which made it possible to replace the initial line of dedicated servers and provide VPS servers with 10-40GB DDR4 RAM resources, 6-24 E5-2650 v4 cores, and most importantly - 1- 4 fully dedicated 4TB HDD or 240-480GB SSD drives. We described in detail the advantages and disadvantages of this product here: The whole truth about VPS (KVM) E5-2650 v4 (6 Cores) 10GB DDR4 240GB SSD 1Gbps from $ 20 or how to divide the server correctly? (options with RAID1 and RAID10 are available).
And everything seems to be fine, we fulfilled the sales plan, sold even more than planned, thousands of users bought our virtual solutions, so we almost completely got rid of outdated servers with E3-1230 and E5620 processors, which were ordered by those subscribers who didn’t could afford the Dell R730xd, although we made it as cheap as possible. After all, now they were able to afford to say just such a VPS (KVM) - E5-2650 v4 (24 Cores) 40GB DDR4 with 4x240GB RAID10 SSD or 4x4TB RAID10 HDD 1Gbps 40TB at the price of the same E3-1230. What is not a good replacement for the obsolete E3-1230 with the same set of disks? Or they even chose the option with 2 times less resources (when so many resources were not required), and saved more than half the budget. As a result, we not only reduced the cost of electricity and maintenance,
However, we could not satisfy the needs of a small part of subscribers. After all, it was impossible to create a full-fledged virtual environment in an existing virtual environment (although certain tricks were used for this in the form of Dockers and other things) + RAM “only” up to 40GB (this problem was partially fixed by the NVM product), there is no way to choose the required RAID level or increase the volume of SSD quotas, while on 2 units we actually placed only 3 clients. In general, there were drawbacks, the solution is not for everyone.
Maybe I’ll open my eyes to someone, but in the Netherlands, most large data centers do not have their own hardware, due to the huge taxes that arise when owning and buying it. Everything is in a long-term (ten-year contract or more) lease from the manufacturer (Dell, HP, Supermicro). Which greatly limits the possibilities. Indeed, in order to ensure an extremely low cost, we had to abandon the whole zoo of configurations and sign one, the most effective platform for everyone. And we used the capabilities of the platform to the maximum, provided the needs of more than 95% of subscribers.
But they could not completely solve the problem.Yes, and the current "more than 95%" of customers are not against improvements. Of course, to put one more configuration is not difficult, but the whole question is in price. How do we compete with the offers of large low-costers, while offering the highest quality and high-end hardware at the same or lower price?
In January of this year, we opened our European representative office SIA UA-Hosting in Latvia for this. This not only increased the convenience of working with us for business subscribers, but also allowed us to start returning VAT on purchases, which also significantly reduced the price. After some time, we will definitely share our experience. There will be a detailed separate article on how to simply register now in Europe instead of Belize, and how difficult it is to open a bank account in the country of registration, even having all the necessary documents for this. None of the help companies will now offer you a bank account in Latvia for a Latvian company, everyone will offer Switzerland and will want 4,000 euros only for help with opening an account, which will not be especially convenient subsequently,
But today we continue about iron. We thought for a long time what 1U solution to offer. Which server can fully satisfy the needs of 5% of customers and significantly expand the capabilities of current ones?
For several months we thought, chose, evaluated. Compare cost-effective for you. Of course, nothing better than the Dell R730xd yet :) Otherwise, we would not continue to offer these solutions, and by the way, we started to do this with updated processors that are Tetradeca Core, not Dodeca, that is, 14 full-fledged cores in each processor , 28 taking into account hyper-trading, and even with frequencies of 2.6 GHz, instead of 2.2, they even decided to lower the price by placing the equipment at the same time in the more expensive data center in Amsterdam , but basically offering only 64GB DDR4 RAM, not 128, because not everyone needs so much:
Dell R730xd - 2x E5-2697v3 2.6GHz 14С 64GB DDR4 4x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - $ 199 / month, however, when paying for 2 years, monthly and when paying for a year it will be more expensive, however, see what beauty:
We use Fortigate to arrange secure access each client to the iDrac leased server. Thanks to Forticlient, you have access to the internal network, and the rest of your traffic will not go through the VPN tunnel, only traffic to the internal network will go through it, which is very convenient, unlike a regular VPN. We include all servers to two independent PDUs (we do not save on sockets):
Each rack-mount switch is connected by 2x10G fiber links to distribution switches, the traffic from which is routed by two independent data center cores. That is, we not only gave the price 2 times lower than the market price, but also gave the premium network at the same price. Internet traffic is delivered by Tier I transit providers such as GTT and NTT, because connectivity without reservation costs about 7,000 euros for 10G in the data center directly, but we provide 2N at a price more than 2 times cheaper, each additional gigabit is $ 450 . Yes, of course, this price implies that not every customer will consume their limit fully, which is why we "risked" to give such a price. Statistics - many years of real experience. 500 servers with a gigabit connection and a traffic limit of 100 TB consume an average of about 20 Gbit / s (and not 160-200 Gbit / s, as you might think), such is the real data. Of course, subscribers who initially consume a lot when ordering Unmetered are not taken into account. It’s just that not everyone really consumes their 100 TB, which is why we are not afraid to sell people traffic at prices lower than that at which the transit provider lets out connectivity.
Among other things, for our subscribers we provide 1G or 10G LAN, as well as IP addresses from RU GEO or NL networks and the ability to use hardware firewall, private switches. Nevertheless, despite the fact that we offered servers at a price more than 2 times lower than the market, and taking into account the premium network, 3-4 times lower than the market, the above part of the clients who cannot afford such a server, and VPS (a third of the physical server) does not suit for various reasons.
We have been choosing the best configuration for a long time, because we still wanted to offer the “newest”, but at the same time cost-effective, and came to the conclusion that we would better give 128GB DDR3 RAM than 64GB DDR4. Why?
- working at the same frequency of 2400 MHz, the memory strips DDR3 and DDR4 show comparable results;
- latency for DDR4 in this case is 15 nanoseconds, and for DDR3 it is 11 nanoseconds, that is, at these frequencies, DDR3 memory is also “faster” in terms of delay;
- any advantages of DDR4 begin to be noticeable only at frequencies above 3000 MHz, which not every user needs, sometimes latency is more important.
The difference between DDR3-2133 and DDR4-2133 is practically insignificant for a number of applications, including for cases of video conversion. DDR3 is faster in more than half the cases.
And since our goal was to offer a low-cost platform, but at the same time cost-effective, we decided to try to provide the following option in the Netherlands at a price of $ 99 / month (at a VPS price):
Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - you can order here
First we want to study the demand, ask you if we were wrong? Already, we have installed for you several such platforms in a rack for 1U servers (and we still have standardization in order not to mix different platforms in one rack in view of the efficient use of network equipment and power) and we are finishing its construction:
The configurations support up to 8 SSD drives and up to 2 PCIe NVMe (if you need a 10G network, then one drive, since a dual-port 10G card will occupy one of the ports). We decided not to provide power-consuming and slow HDDs with this configuration, but to provide two Samsung 960GB (MZ7LH960HAJR) at a good price. When paying for a server for a period of one year or more, additional drives are 2 times cheaper, only + $ 25 / month for a drive. Yes, for $ 249 / month you can get almost 8 TB of SSD quotas and a good Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6С 128GB DDR3 8x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB server.
An additional 1x3.2TB PCI-E Samsung PM1725b SSD will cost a lot ≈ + $ 250 / month (we should at least earn some money not for 5.7 years), but discounts are possible with long-term leases. Why do we install and offer only such drives, and not NVMe hot-swap M2? These drives are still better, latency is many times less due to the connection of PCI-E. It is these drives that are used, say, by banks, or by customers using some kind of processing. M2 is much less effective for these tasks. And although there are 1.6 TB and 6.4 TB volume drives on the market, the reason for not using them is simple. In the case of 1.6 TB, the volume is too small, the PCI-E slots can be exhausted quickly, and in the case of 6.4 TB, the recovery process will take too much time, because 3.2 TB was deservedly chosen as the “golden mean”.
We also pay important attention to such a thing as cabeling. After all, the way the north will be cooled and the energy consumption that occurs as a result of this process depends on the beauty of cable laying. By collecting cables in groups, we reduce the “blocking” area in the path of hot air and it more efficiently dissipates from the racks, as turbulence that interferes with efficient heat dissipation is reduced.
In general, I believe the configuration was a success. Nevertheless, we are ready to listen to criticism about this proposal from the readers of Habr, because very often, expressing opinions, you directed us on the right path , and we are interested in providing you with the most effective solutions in the future. Thank you in advance for this!The offer is limited in quantity and at the moment we have 16 servers in the Netherlands. I do not exclude that in the future, the price of new orders may become higher, but now you have a great chance to design a server at an incredibly low price (in fact, at the cost of colocation, in view of all the described advantages).
It goes without saying that for Habr users a nice bonus is +1 month for free, when paying for Dell R420 for a period of 3 months (to receive a bonus, just leave the order number here in the comments and be a registered Habr user). Thus, you have the opportunity to work for the first 4 months at a price of $ 119, evaluate the quality, and then switch to a two-year payment cycle, paying for the service for 2 years and receiving a unique price of $ 99 / month for the server!
We work with physical. persons and jur. by persons from the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the rest of the world under an agreement, agreements are concluded between us (SIA UA-Hosting, Latvia) and your company. Address, we will be glad to cooperate!