Server Buying Decisions: Memory
by Johan De Gelas on December 19, 2013 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Enterprise
- Memory
- IT Computing
- Cloud Computing
- server
Benchmark method
We used the HP DL 380 Gen8, the best selling server in the world. The good people at Micron helped ensure we could test with 24 DIMMs.
As we were told that the new Xeon E5-26xx V2 ("Ivy Bridge EP") had better support for LRDIMMs than the Xeon E5-26xx ("Sandy Bridge EP"), we tested with both the E5 2680 v2 and the E5-2690 in the Stream and latency tests. For the real-world CDN test (see further) we only use the E5-2680 v2. As the latter test is not limited by the CPU at all (25% load on the E5-2680v2), testing with different CPUs does not make much sense.
Benchmark Configuration: HP DL 380 Gen8 (2U Chassis)
Testing with the HP-DL 380 Gen8 was a very pleasant experience: changing CPUs and DIMMs is extremely easy and does not involve screwdrivers.
The benchmark configuration details can be found below.
| CPU |
Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2680 v2 (2.8GHz, 12c, 25MB L3, 115W) Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2690 (2.9GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 135W) |
| RAM |
768GB (24x32GB) DDR3-1866 Micron MT72JSZS4G72LZ-1G9 (LRDIMM) or 384GB (24 x 16GB) Micron MT36JSF2G72PZ – DDR3-1866 |
| Internal Disks | One Intel MLC SSD710 200GB |
| BIOS version | P70 09/41/2013 |
| NIC | Dual-port Intel X540-T2 10Gbit NC |
| PSU | HP 750W CS Platinum Plus Hot Plug 750 Watt |
A dual-port Intel X540-T2 10Gbit NC was installed and was connected to the DELL PowerConnect 8024F switch with a 20Gbit bond.
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subflava - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Great article...look forward to more enterprise/IT professional based articles from Anandtech in the future. This is very timely for me as my company is just about to pull the trigger on a server upgrade. Interesting stuff.JohanAnandtech - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
Thanks for sharing! :-)DERSS - Friday, December 27, 2013 - link
You guys are seriously super-cool; thanks.wsaenotsock - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
costed?blaktron - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Good article, although as an enterprise architect, I can tell you the one true benefit to LRDIMMS is in 2 and 4 socket vhost builds, because the double density RAM gives you the freedom to turn off NUMA spanning and still get near-ideal guest density.Almost nobody runs caching servers that big, although at almost double performance over a 256GB build (the 100k + concurrent user norm) its kind of attractive to run 2 of these per DC instead of 6 smaller ones (which would actually be the real world comparison with those kind of deltas).
mexell - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Real-world pricing, at least in the enterprise context, is quite a bit off from your numbers. In my employer's price bracket, we regularily buy similar servers as your 24*16GB config for about the same price (13k€) - but including a 3 year subscription VMWare Enterprise license, which is about 6 to 7 k€ on its own. No one pays list price on that kind of hardware.JohanAnandtech - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
Are you sure that there is not a big discount on the VMware license? And smaller enterprises will pay something close to the list price. I know that the typical discount is 10-20% for smaller quantities, not more.blaktron - Friday, December 20, 2013 - link
Depends on the country Johan. The partner channel managers get to decide discounts on partner orders (which he is describing). Also, the bundling discount doesn't happen everywhere, but I could buy that server for like $15k CDN.The VMware license cost seems out of this world to me too, because we license our hosts for anyone from 2500 to 5k CDN, depending on their agreement with VMware.
mexell - Saturday, December 21, 2013 - link
I don't really know where exactly the discount is applied, as the licenses are OEM and we don't get line-item pricing. In our market segment (large enterprise with Dell, medium-to-large with HP) we usually see at least 40% off on list prices, in some cases (networking equipment) up to 75%.VMWare, on the other hand, is especially rigid with their pricing structure. Two years ago, when we negotiated for a 100 host branch office deployment, they referred to their list pricing. For them, we are not even big enough to speak directly to us.
dstarr3 - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Wow. With 768GB of memory, I bet you could run Crysis.