Systems Hardware

Systems Hardware Dumping Ground for General Function & Performance

What is your application bound by?

Disk/Memory Storage

Spindle Drives

Still nice for cold storage or large data needs. Using them as DAS is nice. Note that they do use more power, cause more heat, and vibration all that can lead to more failure. Not sure what the latest SSD vs Spindle drives is these days but Warranty is usually the the same with most all vendors, consumer and enterprise.

SSD

Low, power and faster than Spindle drives SSD can be used for a lot of workload that large arrays of spindle used to handle.

NVME U.2/M.2

U.2 has high capacity but it also is really expensive. It might be cheaper in storage to use CEPH or distributed fs and utilize m.2 drives via pci expander on biforcation MBs as shown below. You cloud do cache and trickly on spindle disk as well for large instances. Note, sata expanders limit what size disk they can detect/use so make sure it supports the size drive you are using if it is an older model or upgrade expander board.

Optane Memory

https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/03/18/researchers-scrutinize-optane-memory-performance/

Software Speed Improvements

Raid

Logs

Cache

Filesystems

CEPH

ZFS

ZIL - https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/o-slog-not-slog-best-configure-zfs-intent-log/

L2ARC

EXT4

Moose/Lizard are options but I would stick with CEPH

Motherboard

PCIe Port Bifurcation via Expander

• https://www.amazon.com/Asus-Hyper-M-2-x16-Card/dp/B0753JTJTG
• https://www.msi.com/PC-component/M.2-XPANDER-AERO
• https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813145042&ignorebbr=1&source=region&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC--pla--Motherboards+-+Server-_-N82E16813145042&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIqqjZn9CM4QIVyLXACh3abAW4EAQYASABEgI6AfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
  • • 4 16x pci-e allows 4x4 m.2

Performance Testing Software

Disk

• fio
• bonnie++

Network

• iperf

Socket Types Intel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_socket

• LGA 2066 (Socket R4) - for Intel's X299 Chipset and i5, i7 and i9 X processors from Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X lines. There are Xeons also available for this socket.
• LGA 3647 (Socket P) - 2066's server/workstation counterpart
• Socket SP3 2017 AMD Epyc Server LGA 4094 ? Depends on DDR4 speed compatible with AMD Epyc processors
• Socket TR4 2017 AMD Ryzen Threadripper Desktop LGA 4094 ? Depends on DDR4 speed compatible with AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors

Form Factors

Server $10-30K

• Dual or quad proc with 32x RAM slots
• 2U 24
• 4U 36x3.5 https://www.ebay.com/itm/UXS-Server-New-RAID-4U-36-Bay-SATA-SAS3108-SAS3-12Gb-s-NFS-2x-10GB-Supermicro-/132795533468

DAS

You can always use Directly Attach Disk (DAS) to JBOD via expander and SATA/SAS connector and LSI controller with external connectors like https://www.amazon.com/LSI-Logic-SAS-9300-8e-LSI00343/dp/B00DSUROKS/https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118216 . As mentioned before, make sure your expander supports your disk size. This nice thing about using a large 36 disk DAS is you do all the cache and fast disk on your Server 2U and trickle down into the DAS spindle disk. Yes connection is slower but it usually doesn't matter that much because spindle is slow.