Phenom as Server

[time]

So I'm planning to do something pretty unexpected: use a Phenom X6 as a (file & database) small business server.

The idea is to have one primary server and one backup server, which can also take over as the primary if needed. Thanks to M$ licensing, only one at a time will be running Windows Server etc. The backup server will be utilized as a spare workstation (with hidden backup storage) most of the time.

The drawbacks with using a dedicated Intel Xeon platform are: it's expensive in this part of the world, the motherboards are not widely unavailable and are often missing features, and it will be a big PITA to find a replacement if it becomes necessary. With a 'desktop' AMD solution, I can either put aside a spare motherboard for $100 or just rely on their much greater prevalence (the same boards support all AMD CPUs up to this point).

The key is that unlike Intel, AMD desktop CPUs support ECC RAM. Asus (not Gigabyte) specifically supports it in their AMD motherboards, although it's limited to unregistered and therefore 16GB (4x4). I'm fine with that, I think it's enough for 6 cores and I don't need anywhere near that much - it's not for running a fleet of VMs or anything.

When you look at what you get with the AMD chipset, it certainly helps my cause. USB 3.0, plus six SATA 3 ports, configurable in arrays of up to 4 drives each. And I really like the remote RAID admin, you can control absolutely everything across a network. A year ago, people were struggling to get top SATA 3 performance, but with driver updates, throughput now exceeds the Intel ICH10 (in some parameters). So with an IDE DVD drive, I can connect six SATA 3 SSDs directly to the motherboard.

I can also use MicroATX form factor, although this time I've chosen not to for the primary server.

Now I need people to tell me what an ass I'm being.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't think that's a horrible idea. You're planning a server system, so the extra power utilization won't be ridiculous. I'd be a little concerned about the motherboard, but I suspect that for the cost-savings of looking at AMD, you can afford to factor in the cost of a couple spare motherboards and still come out ahead of the game.

When I do the desktop parts for server machines deal, I generally buy an extra motherboard and power supply. In your case I might also spend the cash to pick up a couple extra sticks of that ECC RAM, since that's an exotic part you'd have trouble replacing on anything like short notice.

Beyond that, I don't see a problem.

 

[time]

Thanks Mercutio. My plan is to use ECC RAM in the backup server as well, so it can be scavenged if needed (it can run off ordinary DDR-non-ECC just fine). I also planned a third PC with the same motherboard to be sacrificed in the event of a failure, but the boards are so cheap I prefer your idea.

 

[time]

I've been playing with 4 Crucial M4 64GB SSDs hosted on a 3GHz Phenom X6 (an experiment before deciding on the final form of the storage). Drivers are dated May 2011.

Running individual drives with AHCI, the AMD SATA 6Gb/s controller rocks. Atto sees 400MB/s reads easily, access times look good, but as widely known the M4 is a lot slower in 4kB random access than the C300 it replaced.

Things slow down once you select RAID mode in the BIOS. But apparently that happens with Intel's onboard controller as well.

With 4 drives in RAID 0, I saw 1150MB/s in Atto (latest version). Three drives got to 900-965MB/s.

With 4 drives in RAID 5, sequential throughput peaked around 900MB/s or so, which is consistent with the RAID 0 results. Three drives dropped to about 600MB/s. Performance was significantly better than Windows soft RAID 5 (dynamic disks), although write performance was awful with both: AS SSD dropped to 5 or 6 MB/s writes of 4kB blocks.

Four drives in RAID 10 achieved excellent results - if you can believe the benchmarks. :roll: Atto and AS SSD both recorded 900MB/s reads! But Crystal was closer to 600MB/s. The AS SSD ISO copy test hit 384MB/s, but in RAID 5 it was 500MB/s.

Not sure what all this means. :dunno: Unfortunately, the old MS SQL server simulation test crashes with I/O write errors. Can anyone think of some other decent test I can run, or should I start panicking now?

 

[time]

Nuts, I was trying to use the 32-bit version of SQLIOSIM. The 64-bit version runs just fine. Now I just need to make sense of the results.

BTW, the RAID 5 copy simulation from AS SSD is more like 585MB/s.

In RAID 0, I was unable to match Ddrueding's dual PCI-e SSD scores in AS SSD and pegged out at about 900. Most likely due to the mediocre 4kB random read results of about 20MB/s.

 

[Mercutio]

Do you have any quantity of representative test data to play with? Have you considered trying MySQL and a benchmark script for that?

 

[ddrueding]

i have also been unable to match the speed of any of the pcie ssds with any self made raid of sata ssds. I'm convinced that firmware optimization is needed before performance can be optimized.

 

[time]

Have you considered trying MySQL and a benchmark script for that?

Do you have one?

 

[Mercutio]

There's a perl script called mybench that you could try.

 

[time]

i have also been unable to match the speed of any of the pcie ssds with any self made raid of sata ssds. I'm convinced that firmware optimization is needed before performance can be optimized.

By shifting the AMD controller back to its simple AHCI rather than RAID mode, then creating a 4-drive RAID 0 as a dynamic disk, I see >1200MB/s in the top 4 Atto sizes and an AS SSD score of 990.

So I only need to find another 10 in the score to match or exceed your twin PCI-e cards. That's not hard, I've got this far with the slower writing 64GB M4 SSD - wait until I install the 128GB versions.

Unfortunately, I don't have any confidence in the dynamic disk approach. In real life AMD's slightly slower onboard RAID looks like a more sensible solution to live with. Now Linux, on the other hand, would absolutely fly with soft RAID on this rig.

 

[Mercutio]

As far as dynamic disks go, I won't even use them for RAID1 in a production setting, something you would think it would be difficult to screw up. I'm fine with setting them up for quick data dumps with my Windows servers at home but that's about it.

 

[time]

Weirdly, the 128GB versions of the M4 proved to be significantly slower in my testing, at least for reads. Slightly disturbing, but too late to change now.

Writes in RAID 5 still top out at about 50 MB/s unless you use enormous (>=1MB) blocks. Less than 7 MB/s in AS SSD 4kB writes, so only about 1700 write I/Os per second.

I guess it's okay when compared to RAID 5 of 4 7200rpm drives, especially given it's fake/onboard?

Reads are decent, and I mainly want it to be able to do fast table scans while also performing index lookups, so I think it's probably worth the additional 50% storage capacity over RAID 10.

Thoughts? Are there write amplification issues that I don't know about?

Oh yeah, it runs fine degraded, but at default settings (it's configurable) it takes roughly a 50% performance hit when rebuilding. I estimate a rebuild will only take a couple of hours, so I'm not that troubled.

 

[ddrueding]

I would go back to RAID-10. The IO loss would not sit well with me.

 

[LunarMist]

Does your M4 suffer from the freezing or is that only on certain Intel ICH?

 

[time]

I haven't noticed any M4 freezing on either AMD, Intel H61 or Marvell controllers.

 

[LunarMist]

Thanks. She ordered one today.

 

[Chewy509]

AMD based server

Just saw this on HP's website. It's targeted at SMB, but should make a nice home server for those with minimal requirements.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/au/e...-4237916-4237917-4237917-4248009-5040202.html

Price starts at AU$480, with 1yr next business day, onsite warranty. (It is a little expensive and any one of us could build something faster and cheaper, but having the next business day onsite warranty is nice).

The interesting point from the detailed spec sheet - it only consumes 73W with all 4 HDD bays loaded and 8GB Reg ECC RAM installed. It's also certified for use with Windows Server and Red Hat Linux. There are reports that FreeBSD and Solaris 11 Express all work with the server, without having to install any additional hardware.