DDR3 or DDR4? Why did we offer the Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps at $ 99 in the Netherlands?
Over two years have passed since we started to provide the Dell R730xd platform in the Netherlands at very low prices - from $ 249 / month (2 times lower than the market average), because in the purchase, even now, when the latest generation E5-2650 v4 processors are announced producer 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 a multitude of cluster solutions for our business subscribers, as well as individual users. We have developed and successfully launched an additional product for sale - virtual servers with dedicated drives, which allowed replacing the initial line of dedicated servers and providing 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. Details about the advantages and disadvantages of this product, we told here: The whole truth about the VPS (KVM) E5-2650 v4 (6 Cores) 10GB DDR4 240GB SSD 1Gbps from $ 20 or how to share the server? (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more than planned, thousands of users bought our virtual solutions, thanks to which we got rid of almost completely outdated servers with E3-1230 and E5620 processors, which those subscribers ordered that did not could afford a Dell R730xd, although we made it as cheap as possible. After all, now they could afford to say this VPS (KVM) - E5-2650 v4 (24 Cores) 40GB DDR4 with 4x240GB RAID10 SSD or 4x4TB RAID10 HDD 1Gbps 40TB for the price of the same E3-1230. What is not a good replacement for the outdated E3-1230 with the same set of disks? Or even chose the option with resources 2 times less (when so many resources were not required), and saved more than half of the budget. As a result, we not only reduced the cost of electricity and maintenance, because new hardware is less likely to fail and almost not buggy, more energy efficient, more subscribers can be placed on fewer units, but most importantly, increased customer satisfaction with our service.
')
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 already existing virtual environment (although certain tricks were used for this in the form of Dockers and others) + RAM âonlyâ up to 40GB (this problem was partially fixed by the NVMe product), there is no possibility to choose the right RAID level or increase the amount of SSD quotas, while on 2 units we actually placed only 3 clients. In general, there were drawbacks, the solution is not for everyone.
It is possible for someone to open my eyes, but in the Netherlands, most large data centers do not have their own hardware, due to the huge taxes that arise when you own and buy it. Everything is in a long-term (ten-year contract or more) lease from the manufacturer (Dell, HP, Supermicro). Which greatly limits the possibilities. After all, 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 all. And we used the capabilities of the platform to the maximum, provided the needs of more than 95% of subscribers.
But they could not solve the problem completely. Yes, and the current "more than 95%" of customers, not against improvements. Of course, to put another configuration is not difficult, but the whole question is about the price. How can 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 of 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 share our experience. There will be a detailed separate article on how easy it is to register now in Europe, instead of Belize, and how difficult it is to open a bank account in the country of registration, even if you have all the necessary documents for this. None of the helping firms will offer you a bank account in Latvia for a Latvian company, everyone will offer Switzerland and will want 4000 euros only for help with opening an account, which will not be very convenient later if you accept the same PayPal ( will result in additional commissions and the amounts will pour out in the tens of thousands of euros per year, depending on your turnovers, as additional fees apply if your account is not the country of registration).
But today we will continue about the gland. We thought for a long time what solution to offer 1U. What kind of server can fully meet the needs of 5% of clients and significantly expand the capabilities of current ones?
For several months we thought, chose, evaluated. We compared the cost-effective indicator for you. Of course, there is nothing better than the Dell R730xd :) Otherwise, we would not continue to offer these solutions, and by the way, we began to do this with updated processors that are Tetradeca Core and not Dodeca, that is, 14 full 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 a more expensive data center in Amsterdam , but basically offering only 64GB DDR4 RAM, and not 128, not everyone needs so much:
Dell R730xd - 2x E5-2697v3 2.6GHz 14C 64GB DDR4 4x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - $ 199 / month, though if you pay for 2 years, monthly and when paid for a year it will be more expensive, however, see what beauty:
We use Fortigate to securely access each client to the rental iDrac server. Thanks to Forticlient, you have access to the internal network, and the rest of your traffic will not pass through a VPN tunnel, only traffic to the internal network will pass through it, which is very convenient, unlike a normal VPN. We include all servers to two independent PDUs (we do not save on power outlets):
Each rack switch is connected by 2x10G fiber-optic links to distribution-switches, the traffic from which is routed by two independent cores of the data center. That is, we not only gave the price 2 times lower than the market price, but also gave a premium network at the same price. Internet traffic is delivered by such Tier I transit providers such as GTT and NTT, because connectivity without reservation costs about 7,000 euros per 10G in the data center directly, we also provide 2N at a price of more than 2 times cheaper, each additional gigabit - $ 450 . Yes, of course, itâs included in this price that not every customer will fully use his limit, thatâs why we âventuredâ 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 one might think), these are real data. Of course, subscribers who initially consume a lot when ordering Unmetered are not taken into account. Itâs just that not everyone actually consumes his 100 TB, thatâs why we are not afraid to sell people traffic at prices lower than the one at which the transit provider releases 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 of more than 2 times lower than the market, and taking into account the premium network - 3-4 times lower than the market, the above described part of customers still cannot afford such a server, and VPS (a third of the physical server) does not suit for various reasons.
We chose the best configuration for a long time, because we still wanted to offer the ânewestâ, but at the same time cost-effective and came to the conclusion that we would rather give 128GB DDR3 RAM than 64GB DDR4. Why?
- working at the same frequency of 2400 MHz, the DDR3 and DDR4 memory bars show comparable results;
- latency for DDR4 in this case is 15 nanoseconds, and for DDR3 it is 11 nanoseconds, that is, at such frequencies, DDR3 memory is also âfasterâ in terms of latency;
- any advantages of DDR4 begin to be noticeable only at frequencies above 3000 MHz, which is far from necessary for every user; sometimes the latency is more important.
The difference between DDR3-2133 and DDR4-2133 is practically insignificant for a whole range of applications, including for cases of video conversion. DDR3 is faster in more than half the time.
And since our goal was to offer the lowest 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 the price of VPS):
Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - can be ordered here
To begin with, we want to study the demand, ask you, are we not mistaken? Already, we have installed several such platforms for you in a rack for 1U servers (and we still have standardization so as not to mix different platforms in the same rack due to the efficient use of network equipment and power) and finish its construction:
Configurations support up to 8 SSD drives and up to 2 PCIe NVMe (if a 10G network is required, then one drive, since a dual-port 10G card will take 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 you pay for a server for a period of one year - additional drives are 2 times cheaper, only for + $ 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 6 128GB DDR3 8x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB server.
Additional storage 1x3.2TB PCI-E Samsung PM1725b SSD will cost a lot â + $ 250 / month (we should at least earn something not 5.7 years), but discounts are possible with a long-term lease. 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 applying some kind of processing. M2 is much less effective for these tasks. And although there are 1.6 TB drives and 6.4 TB volumes 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 takes too much time, because 3.2 TB was deservedly chosen as the âgolden meanâ.
We also pay close attention to such a thing as cabeling. After all, the beauty of cable management depends on how the north will cool and the power consumption that occurs as a result of this process. Putting the cables in groups, we reduce the âblockingâ area in the path of hot air and it is more efficiently dispersed from the racks, as the turbulence is reduced, which impede effective heat dissipation.
In general, I believe that the configuration was a success. Nevertheless, we are ready to listen to criticism about this proposal from Habr's readers, because very often, expressing opinions, you directed us on the right path , and we are interested in providing you with and in the future the most effective solutions. Thank you in advance for this! The offer is limited in quantity and at the moment we have available 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 issue a server at an incredibly low price (in fact, at the cost of colocation, in view of all the advantages described).
It goes without saying that for Habr users a pleasant bonus is +1 month for free, when paying for Dell R420 for a period of 3 months (to get the 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 dollars, assess 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 per server!
We work with nat. persons and legal entities persons from the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the rest of the world under the contract, contracts are concluded between us (SIA UA-Hosting, Latvia) and your company. Contact us, we will be glad to cooperate!
We have successfully implemented on these platforms a multitude of cluster solutions for our business subscribers, as well as individual users. We have developed and successfully launched an additional product for sale - virtual servers with dedicated drives, which allowed replacing the initial line of dedicated servers and providing 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. Details about the advantages and disadvantages of this product, we told here: The whole truth about the VPS (KVM) E5-2650 v4 (6 Cores) 10GB DDR4 240GB SSD 1Gbps from $ 20 or how to share the server? (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, thanks to which we got rid of almost completely outdated servers with E3-1230 and E5620 processors, which those subscribers ordered that did not could afford a Dell R730xd, although we made it as cheap as possible. After all, now they could afford to say this VPS (KVM) - E5-2650 v4 (24 Cores) 40GB DDR4 with 4x240GB RAID10 SSD or 4x4TB RAID10 HDD 1Gbps 40TB for the price of the same E3-1230. What is not a good replacement for the outdated E3-1230 with the same set of disks? Or even chose the option with resources 2 times less (when so many resources were not required), and saved more than half of the budget. As a result, we not only reduced the cost of electricity and maintenance, because new hardware is less likely to fail and almost not buggy, more energy efficient, more subscribers can be placed on fewer units, but most importantly, increased customer satisfaction with our service.
')
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 already existing virtual environment (although certain tricks were used for this in the form of Dockers and others) + RAM âonlyâ up to 40GB (this problem was partially fixed by the NVMe product), there is no possibility to choose the right RAID level or increase the amount of SSD quotas, while on 2 units we actually placed only 3 clients. In general, there were drawbacks, the solution is not for everyone.
It is possible for someone to open my eyes, but in the Netherlands, most large data centers do not have their own hardware, due to the huge taxes that arise when you own and buy it. Everything is in a long-term (ten-year contract or more) lease from the manufacturer (Dell, HP, Supermicro). Which greatly limits the possibilities. After all, 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 all. And we used the capabilities of the platform to the maximum, provided the needs of more than 95% of subscribers.
But they could not solve the problem completely. Yes, and the current "more than 95%" of customers, not against improvements. Of course, to put another configuration is not difficult, but the whole question is about the price. How can 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 of 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 share our experience. There will be a detailed separate article on how easy it is to register now in Europe, instead of Belize, and how difficult it is to open a bank account in the country of registration, even if you have all the necessary documents for this. None of the helping firms will offer you a bank account in Latvia for a Latvian company, everyone will offer Switzerland and will want 4000 euros only for help with opening an account, which will not be very convenient later if you accept the same PayPal ( will result in additional commissions and the amounts will pour out in the tens of thousands of euros per year, depending on your turnovers, as additional fees apply if your account is not the country of registration).
But today we will continue about the gland. We thought for a long time what solution to offer 1U. What kind of server can fully meet the needs of 5% of clients and significantly expand the capabilities of current ones?
For several months we thought, chose, evaluated. We compared the cost-effective indicator for you. Of course, there is nothing better than the Dell R730xd :) Otherwise, we would not continue to offer these solutions, and by the way, we began to do this with updated processors that are Tetradeca Core and not Dodeca, that is, 14 full 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 a more expensive data center in Amsterdam , but basically offering only 64GB DDR4 RAM, and not 128, not everyone needs so much:
Dell R730xd - 2x E5-2697v3 2.6GHz 14C 64GB DDR4 4x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - $ 199 / month, though if you pay for 2 years, monthly and when paid for a year it will be more expensive, however, see what beauty:
We use Fortigate to securely access each client to the rental iDrac server. Thanks to Forticlient, you have access to the internal network, and the rest of your traffic will not pass through a VPN tunnel, only traffic to the internal network will pass through it, which is very convenient, unlike a normal VPN. We include all servers to two independent PDUs (we do not save on power outlets):
Each rack switch is connected by 2x10G fiber-optic links to distribution-switches, the traffic from which is routed by two independent cores of the data center. That is, we not only gave the price 2 times lower than the market price, but also gave a premium network at the same price. Internet traffic is delivered by such Tier I transit providers such as GTT and NTT, because connectivity without reservation costs about 7,000 euros per 10G in the data center directly, we also provide 2N at a price of more than 2 times cheaper, each additional gigabit - $ 450 . Yes, of course, itâs included in this price that not every customer will fully use his limit, thatâs why we âventuredâ 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 one might think), these are real data. Of course, subscribers who initially consume a lot when ordering Unmetered are not taken into account. Itâs just that not everyone actually consumes his 100 TB, thatâs why we are not afraid to sell people traffic at prices lower than the one at which the transit provider releases 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 of more than 2 times lower than the market, and taking into account the premium network - 3-4 times lower than the market, the above described part of customers still cannot afford such a server, and VPS (a third of the physical server) does not suit for various reasons.
We chose the best configuration for a long time, because we still wanted to offer the ânewestâ, but at the same time cost-effective and came to the conclusion that we would rather give 128GB DDR3 RAM than 64GB DDR4. Why?
- working at the same frequency of 2400 MHz, the DDR3 and DDR4 memory bars show comparable results;
- latency for DDR4 in this case is 15 nanoseconds, and for DDR3 it is 11 nanoseconds, that is, at such frequencies, DDR3 memory is also âfasterâ in terms of latency;
- any advantages of DDR4 begin to be noticeable only at frequencies above 3000 MHz, which is far from necessary for every user; sometimes the latency is more important.
The difference between DDR3-2133 and DDR4-2133 is practically insignificant for a whole range of applications, including for cases of video conversion. DDR3 is faster in more than half the time.
And since our goal was to offer the lowest 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 the price of VPS):
Dell R420 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - can be ordered here
To begin with, we want to study the demand, ask you, are we not mistaken? Already, we have installed several such platforms for you in a rack for 1U servers (and we still have standardization so as not to mix different platforms in the same rack due to the efficient use of network equipment and power) and finish its construction:
Configurations support up to 8 SSD drives and up to 2 PCIe NVMe (if a 10G network is required, then one drive, since a dual-port 10G card will take 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 you pay for a server for a period of one year - additional drives are 2 times cheaper, only for + $ 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 6 128GB DDR3 8x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB server.
Additional storage 1x3.2TB PCI-E Samsung PM1725b SSD will cost a lot â + $ 250 / month (we should at least earn something not 5.7 years), but discounts are possible with a long-term lease. 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 applying some kind of processing. M2 is much less effective for these tasks. And although there are 1.6 TB drives and 6.4 TB volumes 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 takes too much time, because 3.2 TB was deservedly chosen as the âgolden meanâ.
We also pay close attention to such a thing as cabeling. After all, the beauty of cable management depends on how the north will cool and the power consumption that occurs as a result of this process. Putting the cables in groups, we reduce the âblockingâ area in the path of hot air and it is more efficiently dispersed from the racks, as the turbulence is reduced, which impede effective heat dissipation.
In general, I believe that the configuration was a success. Nevertheless, we are ready to listen to criticism about this proposal from Habr's readers, because very often, expressing opinions, you directed us on the right path , and we are interested in providing you with and in the future the most effective solutions. Thank you in advance for this! The offer is limited in quantity and at the moment we have available 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 issue a server at an incredibly low price (in fact, at the cost of colocation, in view of all the advantages described).
It goes without saying that for Habr users a pleasant bonus is +1 month for free, when paying for Dell R420 for a period of 3 months (to get the 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 dollars, assess 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 per server!
We work with nat. persons and legal entities persons from the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the rest of the world under the contract, contracts are concluded between us (SIA UA-Hosting, Latvia) and your company. Contact us, we will be glad to cooperate!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/449908/
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