Hardware update - March update 2 of 2

There has been quite a few updates to the SteamID network in terms of hardware.

lets start off with the bad bit, I managed to somehow drop a stick of memory while upgrading a server breaking the CPU socket…, Anyway onto the good bits

A few updates back I posted up the new SteamArchive server which can take 32 hard drives, Sadly this is now being sold. I had a offer I could not refuse and the cost of this server means more than just a single server update and overall less running costs!

So, this happened… While some consider this old you have to remember that SteamID runs on a budget and on top of server costs there are storage costs, electric costs , cooling costs (electric) , license costs , maintenance and so on.

I managed to grab a Dell R630 with 24 cores / 48 threads and 192Gb of DDR4 memory sadly it didn’t have an Idrac (remote management license) and it didn’t have the raid controller I wanted, so license purchased and a card ordered from China, new. I’m just waiting for that.

The PCIE nvme enterprise drive I already had was moved into this R630 and the performance different was instantly noticeable, a task which could process 26,000 records per second on a good day was almost hitting 50,000 per second on this server, So this is a really good move. This also makes way for a (hopefully) replicated database extra statistics can be produced on without locking up the website. I cannot guarantee it will happen but I would love to create a really complex advanced search page for you guys which will send the task off to this second database and return its results back when its done. While all this is going on the power usage of this server over the other main one is significantly less, which is helped by all flash storage.

Along with the server I bought another pair of 1.92 TB enterprise SSDs, Only SATA but these were new pulls from new servers that were unwanted so I got them heavily discounted. The write limit on them is something around 2 petabytes, ideal for database stuff and not much more than you can get good consumer ones for.

SteamArchive storage Is needed still as I kept moving things around to hold out as long as I could but then I had an idea which so far is working great, I took one of my backup storage servers and have re-purposed this to be the main storage server SteamArchive which can for no at least hold all the SteamArchive virtual machines, I will get another when it gets full.

10 x 3TB SAS Drives so we can back this data up
For every 1 TB of SteamArchive there is around 6 to 7 TB of raw disk used because of raid , replication and backups so it gets eaten up very quickly – the cost to host this online is insane! But it would be much less of a headache.

I have spent this weekend moving things around on servers and getting it ready for when the raid controller gets here.

The R630 will replace the dell R720 here with 384 GB of ram as the performance different is far too great to ignore. The R720 will be sold off to fund more flash storage for the servers or possibly another newer server for other projects. Running 2 x servers rather than the single R720 saves me an estimated £350 per year in electric, this is more power, more storage with cheaper running costs.

If you made it this far, well done I ramble quite a lot but its nice sometimes to take a break from server stuff, stick some music on while battling with the kids who are fighting in the background and knock some updates up.