How to choose between i7 vs Xeon with server usage in mind

[net4u2]

Hi,
What can be aspects to consider for choosing between i7 and xeon for building a small infrastructure of small servers or even "pseudo-servers". The budget is a huge constraint and I have to choose between (relatively affordable) refurbished or second-hand old generation servers or in house built "pseudo-servers" based on recent i7 developments.
I have at this moment a couple of pseudo-servers (based on Win2012R2) as follows: 1 DNS/WEB "server", 1 SQL, and 1 Mail. They are based at this moment around Athlon 64 X2 processors. My main business is to develop web apps and I intend to complement this with a kind of micro hosting business (not very many apps, for not very many customers and definitely not big one). So for me the final goal is the subjective perception about application responsiveness. Of course I take count on also other relevant aspects (such e.g. connectivity: I have two decent fiber optic connections, etc.), but the hardware aspect is that intrigues me most at this time.
Any help is appreciated

Regards

 

[rgd1101]

xeon with more cores, what is your budget.

 

[drtweak]

A few things.

1) K versions of Core i can be over clocked. Xeons can not
2) Xeons support ECC Memory which can be critical in a Always Up system
3) Core i Series CPU's can NOT have more than 1 CPU. Getting a Dual LGA 2011 Board will NOT work with dual i7's. You MUST use Xeons with that. and even then each Xeon series (E3, E5, E7) can also only support up to so many CPUs. I think the E3 is a max of 2 CPU's and E5 is like 4 and then the E7 are for system with more than 4 CPU's

Also depending on what you do is conectivity. if you go with 1151 or a i7/E3 they will all be 4 cores 8 theads. If you need more horse power then you need to go Socket 2011.

 

[net4u2]

Thanks for answer. In what concerns hardware limitations and/or advantage of each processors I am already edified, but what I want to find out is how each influence the general performance. I have now doubt that for example i7 performs much better that my old Athlon64. But is enough?
I may say that I have no budget at this moment, but I have to calculate and build one in near future. So what I want to understand is that the difference in terms of advantages between Xeon and i7 make sense for choosing the much much more expensive (at least for me) refurbished servers approach or with fairly comparable results I may choose the i7 approach. As I said I have not hundreds of web applications and web sites, and there are not intended to be hundred of thousand user, but maybe dozens, eventually hundreds. Is not a big scale, I did not plan to build a data-center at home. In what concerns connectivity I have two optical connections that assures me a ping around 20 ms, a jitter around 2 ms and a summed average speed about 300 Mbps (both DL and UL, nearly symmetrical)

 

[rgd1101]

Thanks for answer. In what concerns hardware limitations and/or advantage of each processors I am already edified, but what I want to find out is how each influence the general performance. I have now doubt that for example i7 performs much better that my old Athlon64. But is enough?
I may say that I have no budget at this moment, but I have to calculate and build one in near future. So what I want to understand is that the difference in terms of advantages between Xeon and i7 make sense for choosing the much much more expensive (at least for me) refurbished servers approach or with fairly comparable results I may choose the i7 approach. As I said I have not hundreds of web applications and web sites, and there are not intended to be hundred of thousand user, but maybe dozens, eventually hundreds. Is not a big scale, I did not plan to build a data-center at home. In what concerns connectivity I have two optical connections that assures me a ping around 20 ms, a jitter around 2 ms and a summed average speed about 300 Mbps (both DL and UL, nearly symmetrical)

Any i7 would be better than your Athlon64

If you are running multiple server apps, it better to have more cores than faster cores

 

[net4u2]

Any i7 would be better than your Athlon64

If you are running multiple server apps, it better to have more cores than faster cores

So this obvious point balance to Xeon...
But what about a mixed approach: real Xeon server for web server and pseudo-server based on i7 for SQL server ?
off-topic: is there some white-papers/literature about calculating/dimension servers?

 

[drtweak]

Agreed with rgd1101. If you are going to be having all this throughput having some Xeon E5's (You can get like a supermicro dual socket board but just get one CPU for now) this way you can upgrade later.

Also depends on how much storage space you need and how fast it needs to be. depending on what you need either SSD's or HDD's depends on what kind of case you get. also depending on what kind of motherboard, if you can use a tower or get a rack mount case etc.

To me it sounds like I would go with something new. Minus storage space you can build a good, upgradable server for about 2-3k starting out. Just using a workstation isn't going to cut it. It sounds like you guys need server grade hardware if you plan on growning that much.

Also most server boards come with dual Gigabit nics which can handle that speed. If you get a good board, and proper switchs you can setup NIC Teaming which can help with LAN side through put if it seems slow. I had a client running an older Dell PE 2900 server. We upgraded the CPU's (They are socket 771 so the Core 2 Duo series. They are Dual E5440 @ 2.83 Ghz) and upgrade to 8 GB ram and added a RAID 10 for files and then Teamed the NIC cards and BAM things were twice as fast for the 50 or so PC's that accessed the server.

So yea a newer Server would be better for the future, but even some over servers are still good. Again storage is another factor as well.

 

[rgd1101]

why do you want a i7? are you looking at price? if so then sure, i7 would work too.

 

[net4u2]

why do you want a i7? are you looking at price? if so then sure, i7 would work too.

I have in mind two aspects: first is the budget that is nearly zero at this very moment, and second I think at generation (but here maybe I am wrong). If I choose refurbished servers I maybe can afford a Gen 6 HP or Gen 9 Dell (so somewhere probably around 2008 architecture). If I choose i7 I may afford a this day architecture.
By heart and ration I prefer a Xeon solution, by budget is more affordable for me i7
I may consider eventually as suggested, a dual CPU server board with only one CPU equipped at start and later upgrade.

 

[drtweak]

If that is the case a PE 2900 is good if you need the storage space. it has 8 Hot Swap bays. The 2950 only has 6 BUT the 2950 supports Every Socket 771 Xeon as that was the last Dell server to support them before they moved to 2011/1155 socket for High/Low servers. Parts are CHEAP for those two. You can guy a cheap 6Gbps RAID card in it, have up to 6/8 drives, as well.

The only thing about used servers, they are used and who knows how much longer they will last but honestly the PE series are freaken Tanks and the only reason why my clinents dump their older servers with SCSI drives is because they are just old and not because they broke.

I have only had 1 PSU fail in a few dozen server, and only seen 2 drive failures. the PSU and 1 of the drives was in a PE 2800 system that was 10 years old. The other was from a 5 year old server and twas a 300GB 15K SAS drive. Otherwise I have yet to have any other issue with a few dozen Dell Servers.

 

[net4u2]

thank you guys