New server CPU pricing out
posted in Technology |The pricing is out for the July ‘07 CPU refresh from Intel. $1172 for the high end quad-core 3ghz model, but buy one step down and $744 gets you quad-core 2.66ghz with the faster 1333 MHz bus (which I’d assume is going to be important for these bandwidth hungry cpus).
So far I’ve been really happy with my Tyan 1U server barebones which looks like its about $800. Add a little RAM and for about $2500 you can have a server with 21ghz worth of CPU cycles for computationally intensive tasks. If you need storage it looks like $3500 will get you a 4TB machine, and add a bit more RAM, run XenServer and you have an incredible amount of resources split into different virtual machines all in a 1U slot. Pretty amazing.
When I got my first server for the data center I thought the next step would be to upgrade it. I probably will put some extra disks in it (not that CalendarData needs the storage space) but I’ll probably buy a 2nd machine before I upgrade the CPUs in the first one. That way I can have two machines and when I need to upgrade one I can move the VMs to the other one. In theory this also means that if I have a hardware issue my downtime can be fairly small too.