Tim On Computer Science

Ever wonder what the big Amazon instances would cost if you bought one (instead of rented)? Here is an attempt to answer that question. Note: Amazon EC2 provides more than just the hardware (e.g. network connectivity and bandwidth, for starters), so this isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison.

From the Amazon page, the short specifications are: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, 244 GiB RAM, 2x120GB SSD, 10GB Ethernet. Those CPUs provide 8 cores times hyper-threading each, for a total of 2x8x2 = 32 vCPUs and 88 ECUs.

According to Amazon prices in 2013, this virtual machine will cost you $3.50/hour for on-demand, which is $30,660 per year. (See “High-Memory Cluster On-Demand Instances, Eight Extra Large”).

So, of that $30,660 per year, what are the hardware costs?

Note that with “only” 16 memory slots, it needs 16GB sticks of ECC REG to achieve 256GB.

Note that the CPU does not come with coolers. I’ve never heard of the Dynatron brand, but it was one of the few “low height” fan/cooler combinations I could find. It is ridiculous to think of risking a $1,600 CPU like that. That detail is what prompted me to look at the “custom-build” shops – since they would have more experience in this critical area.

Here are a few custom-build shop prices, for comparison:

• at www.aberdeeninc.com a dual E5-2670 machine with 256GB of RAM, without the 10GB NIC, and without the SSDs, came in at $9,380
• at www.serversdirect.com a dual E5-2670 machine with 256GB of RAM, without the 10GB NIC, came in at $7,131.
• at www.thinkmate.com a dual E5-2670 with 256GB of RAM, with a $410 10GB NIC, came in at $9,363.

Caution: Unlike the other postings of mine, this is NOT a built machine. And, at $7,000+, it probably never will be built by me. It is pure “by the specifications” intellectual exercise. It should work, but all of my others builds actually work.

So – here is the machine I’ll build after winning the lottery:

After a ten+ year hiatus, I built another (inexpensive) AMD Server machine. That first AMD machine cost less than $400. I didn’t quite match that cost, but I got pretty close.

The CPU and the RAM were $20 off each. I got unlucky on the CDROM drive and paid an extra $5 compared to the price 3 days later.

For the motherboard, I followed some bad advice, and paid extra for a board that had video out. The problem: the AMD FX CPU does not have built-in graphics. So I ended up needing a PCIe video card anyway. If I had noticed the bad advice in time, I would have purchased this Sata6 motherboard instead. Live, learn, and do your own double-checking.

Some facts on the CPU: it is currently #38 on PassMark [9,128] cpubenchmark.net. It is also the #1 AMD CPU on that list right now. Intel’s 3770K 3.5GHz is #27 and scores [9,596] and costs $310. The 4770K 3.5GHz is #17 and scores [10,154] and costs $350.

All product links are from the actual vendor.

I finally got around to building a highly reliable storage system. Currently, that requires two disk drives and ZFS. And ZFS, in turn, requires something other than Linux. I ended up with FreeNAS. With mirror (RAID 1), ZFS will “self heal” the other mirror on bad reads. With a normal RAID 1, when you lose a drive, the act of rebuilding the array could reveal a read error on the surviving disk. If that happens – blam – you’ve lost the entire RAID. Here is a pretty good article on the analysis as per RAID 5.

The new FreeNAS image requires 2GB of space for the OS image. It turns out that most of the 2GB SD Cards I have are about 40KB short of 2,000,000,000 bytes required. So I ended up putting the image on an 8GB card. Later, I found out that my 4GB HP USB Flash Drive works as well.

A word of caution about the USB drives and SD Cards – it has been hit-and-miss on whether the system will boot. Make sure you have lots of options available.

As usual, prices include taxes and shipping, and reflect discounts. All product links are from the actual vendor.

2018/Feb – The update to FreeNas 11 was kind of painful, and it was mostly my fault. One of the volumes had gotten to 95% full, and the FreeNas 11 import was using 120GB+ more space, which would not fit, so the import failed. Once it had enough free space, the “Save config from 8.3 then Upload config into 11.1” process worked fine. Also, before saving the 8.3 config, the minidlna plugin got removed (it is no longer supported in 11.1).

2018/Mar – Switched the case to the Rosewill RSV-L4500.