

Storm courts I/O lovers with 96GB, 32-core cloud server - bbr
http://gigaom.com/cloud/storm-courts-io-lovers-with-96gb-32-core-cloud-server/

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swombat
At over $986/m, it's a damn sight more expensive than a Hetzner box.

Granted, Hetzner's €89 servers only have 24GB of RAM, not 96, but you can
basically have 7 of them and some change left for the same price. This adds up
to 168GB total RAM, with a total of 28 cores. (
[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix-eq) )

Which one is best will no doubt depend on what you want to do with it, and
certainly there are some applications where only a single, 96GB machine will
do, but those are rare.

~~~
salsakran
True, but the I/O characteristics of one 96GB box is drastically different
from running 7 in parallel. It's kind of a silly comparison.

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maxdemarzi
I would compare against the specials on WHT. Like here's one for WebNX

<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1063117>

48 core Monster, 4x 12core 1.7ghz, 256gb ram(wow!), 16x 73gb 15k SAS raid 10
This is likely the fastest server offered on WHT. This beast has an impressive
256gb ram (perfect for ram drives, or caching heavy accessed content) 4x AMD
6164 12 core cpus, total of 48 cores at 1.7ghz each 256gb ddr3 memory (wow!
tons of ram, perfect for db cache, file cache, etc) 16x 73gb 15,000 rpm SAS
drives w/ hardware raid 10 Almost 600GB of FAST Disk I/O 1x 2TB sata for
backups $999 with 10TB bandwdith

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Zak
The price and specs are great compared to EC2, but there's a problem for some
use cases: you're charged for a month as soon as you create a server. The
credit remains available as long as you have an account, and any remaining
credit is refunded if you close your account, but you can't just spin up a big
server for 3 hours and pay $5. Instead, you have to pay $1000, then close your
account if you want your $995 back.

~~~
Zak
To follow up: I talked to sales today and they confirmed that there's a
hackish workaround for this use case:

Spin up a small server. You'll be charged about $35 (the exact amount will be
shown). Use it if you like, or shut it down right away. You can then start
servers of any size using the ~$35 credit you have. It is important that you
not be running a large server when the billing cycle rolls over, or you will
be charged for a month of that, and this may result in an effective $35/month
usage minimum (though credit does roll over). It's a small hassle, but it may
be worth it for access to that 32-core box.

If you, like me want EC2-style billing, they have a suggestion to that effect
on their uservoice:
[https://storm.uservoice.com/forums/23166-general/suggestions...](https://storm.uservoice.com/forums/23166-general/suggestions/1785147-bill-
at-the-end-of-the-month-for-service-used-rat?ref=title)

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ajdecon
We've got some servers similar to this in one of our compute clusters. Four
12-core AMD Magny-Cours processors, 128 GB RAM... they are a thing of beauty,
let me tell you. Actually very good for certain bioinformatics codes,
especially wired up to each other with Infiniband. :-D

~~~
alok-g
Can you point to the product page and give an idea of the price?

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ajdecon
It's not exactly the same system, but... ICC (Supermicro) 1042G-T with 48
cores (4x 12-core Opteron 6174, 2.2 GHz), 128 GB RAM, 2x 3TB SATA disk and 40
Gb/s QDR Infiniband, $10.6k. Subtract $300 if you'd rather have 10GbE instead
of the IB. All in 1U. <http://www.icc-usa.com/amd-4p-1u-6100.asp>

~~~
alok-g
Very helpful too. Thanks!

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asharp
Hmmmm. I couldn't find this server on storm's cloudharmony.com benchmarking
page (It only goes up to the 48GB model), but it's interesting comparing
nonetheless.

An OrionVM 16 gig of ram server gets an aggregate disk IO score of 156.79 vs.
their 170.5 and an IOPS score of 159.79 vs. their 159.99.

And that's with redundant network backed hard disks in a visualised
environment with all of those benefits and overheads.

What's also interesting is that this is a pxecloud with local 8 disk SAS raid
10 (Not san storage/etc.)

Overall, very interesting offering.

(NB: I work with orionvm a company that makes IOtastic servers)

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latch
I run mogade.com on 2 1GB bare metal web servers, and 2 1.7GB mongo/redis
replicas. It's been rock solid for about 8 months. Initially picked them
because we ran unixbench on it, linode and EC2, and they were significantly
better (2x+ if i recall) and cheaper. They are also quick to answer support.
There's been no downtime (that wasn't caused by me!).

But there are some downsides. First, their web management portal sucks, it's
like whoever built it discovered ajax and jquery for the first time. But you
hardly spend any time there, so no big deal.

Load balancing is expensive (at my cheap scale), and they don't have the API
to do it yourself (remap an ip type thing). Also, they aren't innovating. When
they first started, they were already quite behind AWS and when you compare
what amazon has done the last couple years (email, dns, beanstalk...) they've
only fallen farther behind. I already use S3 and I'm looking at using SMQ
-having a split infrastructure sucks.

Finally, they advertise way too much. Surely I'm not the only one who has seen
it. It's annoying especially when you consider how stagnant they are. Feels
like a very short sighted use of money.

~~~
cschmidt
> Finally, they advertise way too much.

Don't worry about that, they're just retargeting. I went to their website
yesterday for the first time, and now every website I visit has their ads
(which I'd never seen before). If someone is interested enough to hit your
site, then you want to show them lots of ads. That's usually very cost
effective.

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makmanalp
I wonder what the national republican senatorial committee was doing with one
of those?

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tlack
It seems like their bandwidth costs are a bit high, though, which would
mitigate the savings in many cases. Anyone know if they'll play ball and
include free bandwidth? This would be a great machine to host Destructoid.com
if so.

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benologist
Damn that's a big server... we've got 6 boxes that don't even _add up_ to
that.

~~~
sciurus
Not by today's standards; you can buy a PowerEdge R815 with thirty-two 2GHz
cores and 128GB of RAM for $8,000.

~~~
ApolloRising
Are you sure that price is right, Dell is showing that box at quite a bit more
on their site right now.

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salsakran
Hmmm.... the pricing looks tempting.

Anyone know of any history of their uptime?

~~~
jread
Check out <http://cloudharmony.com/status> We've been monitoring Storm for
over 18 months and never once experienced an outage. They are one of only a
few providers with no downtime (we monitor over 100 different cloud services).

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tibbon
Damn. I wish I could somehow actually upload video fast enough to do my 1080p
video processing on those.

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RyanKearney
I was interested up until I read this little number in the newsletter I got
from them:

>In addition to 96GB of RAM, each of these servers contain __32 cores (at
2.0GHZ each, _64.0GHZ total_ ), writes at over 3 Gbit/s and reads at over 4
Gbits/s. __

You would think a company like Storm would know you don't just add up the
cores to get 64Ghz.

Also, for what it's worth, we just ordered 3 physical servers from Dell, 96GB
of RAM each, dual xeons for a total of 32 cores, and dual 10Gbps fiber
channels to hook up to our SAN. So yeah, the price seems pretty high...

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alok-g
Can you point to the product page at Dell, and give an idea of the price?

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ssmoot
IIRC our R610's (96GB, 12 Cores @ 3GHz) were around $7K a piece.

256GB/32 Core/1.8GHz R910s are around $22K last I looked. This stuff really is
stupid cheap in comparison to renting.

You'd need to talk to a Sales person to get that kind of pricing, but the
general rule is to discount MSRP by _at least_ 30% when you're working with a
major vendor.

~~~
alok-g
Very helpful. Thanks!

