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I deal with servers for HPC use. Let me explain why I made my question... Consumer boards for Ryzen CPUs support ECC RAM these days. So, it's not as bad as you

I deal with servers for HPC use. Let me explain why I made my question... Consumer boards for Ryzen CPUs support ECC RAM these days. So, it's not as bad as you think. Is it as reliable as a server board? probably not.. But, I'm not building for or paying for that reliability either - fitness for purpose. I think your comment on storage missed the whole point. The article was about a PCIe 4.0 SSD that I wished to use in servers. They are every bit as fast as the enterprise grade NVMe drives. The differentiation is typically power loss protection. At consumer grade service levels, I don't care, I go cheap, but insane value. Again, fitness for purpose. Networking. I can find a Asus board for Ryzen CPUs with onboard 10G NICs. Sure, server CPUs have more lanes etc and are designed for maximum load sharing across workloads. My quest is the opposite. Give me small, cheap, and insane value servers instead of VMs that are running dog slow in beauty servers used by a hundred others.

bayindirh 6y ago
> I deal with servers for HPC use. Let me explain why I made my question... Hello fellow HPC admin. I'm reporting in from another HPC center. Nice to chat with you. :) > The differentiation is typically power loss protection. At consumer grade service levels, I don't care, I go cheap, but insane value. Again, fitness for purpose. I don't think power loss protection is an enterprise level feature anymore. My Samsung 860 Pro has S.M.A.R.T attribute 235, which reads "POR_Recovery_Count". AFAIK, this attribute counts the times drive has lost power unexpectedly and had to do some housekeeping to recover itself. AFAICS, the drive has 600x write endurance (1 TB version has 600TBW and it's linear with capacity), and if this thing is used in a VM server, it'd die in months. This is where enterprise drives matter. We have some SSDs designated as write caches for high performance ZFS appliances, and they didn't blink an eye to all this hammering. > My quest is the opposite. Give me small, cheap, and insane value servers instead of VMs that are running dog slow in beauty servers used by a hundred others. I understand, but as an HPC admin, you know that space is always at a premium. Having a Ryzen with 24GB ECC RAM and this drive on a non-system-room form factor is a waste of space and cooling capacity, and in today's integrated system room it's very hard to manage without IPMI. So, at the end of the day, no cloud provider will touch this with a 10 feet pole. Even if they roll similar platform on a custom open-compute chassis, they'd opt for a more powerful system because it can a) can fill more roles, b) will be more efficient in terms of performance/watt since they can keep it more uniformly loaded and utilize it more. From my point of view, this is the sad reality unfortunately.

bayindirh 6y ago

> I deal with servers for HPC use. Let me explain why I made my question... Hello fellow HPC admin. I'm reporting in from another HPC center. Nice to chat with you. :) > The differentiation is typically power loss protection. At consumer grade service levels, I don't care, I go cheap, but insane value. Again, fitness for purpose. I don't think power loss protection is an enterprise level feature anymore. My Samsung 860 Pro has S.M.A.R.T attribute 235, which reads "POR_Recovery_Count". AFAIK, this attribute counts the times drive has lost power unexpectedly and had to do some housekeeping to recover itself. AFAICS, the drive has 600x write endurance (1 TB version has 600TBW and it's linear with capacity), and if this thing is used in a VM server, it'd die in months. This is where enterprise drives matter. We have some SSDs designated as write caches for high performance ZFS appliances, and they didn't blink an eye to all this hammering. > My quest is the opposite. Give me small, cheap, and insane value servers instead of VMs that are running dog slow in beauty servers used by a hundred others. I understand, but as an HPC admin, you know that space is always at a premium. Having a Ryzen with 24GB ECC RAM and this drive on a non-system-room form factor is a waste of space and cooling capacity, and in today's integrated system room it's very hard to manage without IPMI. So, at the end of the day, no cloud provider will touch this with a 10 feet pole. Even if they roll similar platform on a custom open-compute chassis, they'd opt for a more powerful system because it can a) can fill more roles, b) will be more efficient in terms of performance/watt since they can keep it more uniformly loaded and utilize it more. From my point of view, this is the sad reality unfortunately.