HPE Servers at Selectel

Today in the blog Selectel guest post - Alexey Pavlov, technical consultant of the company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), will tell about his experience in using the services of Selectel. Let's give him a word.

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

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

Let us recall the questions that customers decide by comparing the traditional approach and the equipment rental model from the provider.
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1. How quickly do you agree on the budget and you can order the configuration of the equipment for the pilot launch of your offspring?
2. Where to find a place under the equipment. Do not put the server itself under the table?
3. The complexity of the hardware stack is growing. Where to find extra hours in the day to deal with everything?

The answer to such and similar questions has long been there: contact your service provider for help. Previously, I was not able to order equipment rental services from Selectel, but here I even managed to test and describe everything in detail:

All applications are got 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 they know exactly what is needed, and during operation there is no need to change the configuration. The server is already assembled and mounted in the data center in advance.


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

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

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


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


For effective deployment of such applications, the company must have sufficient resources. When a customer addresses, we design the solution as a whole, and not separately the software and the server. Together with our customers, we discuss reference architectures and configurations developed by software and hardware vendors, compile a 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 the customer’s project.

Benchmarks

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

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



Such certificates allow you to evaluate the performance of the system in a given configuration within the framework of the test performed and roughly compare it with the expected characteristics in the planned project.

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

“It was born cloud-first,” 22 It is a customer tested and battle ready. ” (Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft)

The HPE portfolio includes special server solutions tested for various industrial platforms. For example, servers HPE DL380 Gen10, which can be used as a "building foundation" in the infrastructure. They showed excellent results in tests for SQL 2017, with the lowest cost per 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 bit-based memory access, which reduces latency and increases the number of transactions by up to 41%. The test results of such configurations are in the public domain .


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

Similar test results are for Oracle and Microsoft Exchange systems.



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

Features and technologies

The HPE Proliant Gen10 server has several unique technologies that allow it to stand out among other servers.

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

Processor types

HPE ProLiant Gen10 is available with five CPU categories:

• Platinum (8100, 8200 series) for ERP, in-memory analytics, 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, 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. Measured results show a difference in performance in comparison with the usual settings up to 9%, which is quite good for customers who want to get the most out of their server.

Jitter Smoothing - saving a given processor frequency without parasitic 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 software licensed by number of cores, such as Oracle. The technology allows you to use less 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 that the application continues to operate in the event of a DRAM failure. The server firmware removes the failed DRAM card of the entire memory and restores the data in the new address space.
• Demand scrubbing : overwrites the corrected data into memory after recovering a correctable 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.
• Failure DIMM Isolation : Identifying a faulty DIMM allows the user to replace only the failed DIMM.

Learn more about the technologies used on the HPE website .

Selectel control panel

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

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



Various operating systems are available for installation, the installation starts automatically:



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



According to analysts, more than half of all small and medium 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 simpler, and for several reasons:

1. Problems with the difficulties of financing (to purchase equipment and build your own infrastructure) are solved.
2. The infrastructure is ready, the product is being launched to the market.
3. Always on hand the help of qualified professionals.
4. It is easy to scale the infrastructure, start with simple configurations and further flexibly adapt the system to the needs of the business.
5. Modern technologies are available for testing with pre-tested configurations for any application and any load.
6. Tested and well-proven, HPE Enterprise solutions are available in a variety of configurations.

Bibliography:

• Persistent Memory Technologies in HPE
• Intel Optane Storage Systems