Buy new not OLD

The most important thing when buying a server is to check the age of the server as many hosting companies are offering older style servers, and while these are OK for starting out they are no good for a production or high traffic website. Old servers have been used and the drives degraded, power supplies worked and all components heated and cooled many times. It’s always best to ensure that you ask for a NEW server from your supplier. Servers Australia only ever offer the newest and latest hardware and this means we can repair/replace any of the parts we have in production as we refresh our fleet every few years. Buying older hardware also means it may be harder to source the parts if and when the old server does stop running.

Data Charges

Getting a nasty surprise from your provider is never a good thing so make sure when buying a server you are given a nice data allowance and that you know the cost of excess data up front. As a guide in Australia you should never pay more than $1.10 per GB for excess data charges, as this is standard across the board and is also a reasonable rate. Buying data in bulk or in advance will generally save you 50% off on your data charges and is important to look out for.

Control Panel or Not

When buying a server, you need to decide if you want and need a control panel such as cPanel or Plesk, as there are many advantages and disadvantages to having a control panel. A control panel is a great resource for someone that has a few websites or owns a hosting/design company. Having a control panel is fantastic for customers and for customer management. It will also save a huge amount of admin time to allow you to focus on running your business. If you have a large scale site that is very busy or requires having servers in multiple locations with load balancing then you need to consider not using a control panel and just go for a standard LAMP setup. This will require a little bit more maintenance but it will give you advanced functionality, such as the load balancing and DRDB which is a distributed raid system.

Customer Support

You may run into some tough situations once in awhile, or need a server reboot to fix a locked server. That will require some assistance from your server provider. If you have a hard time getting in contact with the company providing your server, this is a sign that they do not provide very good customer support. As such, it’s best to choose a company that responds to your e-mail tickets promptly and is always there to help you with any problems. Solid customer service can be a lifesaver in a critical situation, so look for a company that offers a SLA for support response times and also a company that provides true 24/7 emergency support, because yes servers NEVER sleep and ALWAYS seem to break during the night! Servers Australia can manage either of the above, as we have qualified level 2 and 3 technicians that have years and years of experience in managing both control panel based servers and also LAMP servers. Remember we are here to ensure that you get the most out of your new server, so ensuring that the right people are in control of it may just save you the headaches during the busy times of your site.

Port speed

The speed of the port that your server is connected to is very important, as you want to be able to get the content from your server off the providers network as fast as possible. In this day and age a 1 Gbit port is generally recommended. This would allow multiple people to be all downloading a large file from your server at full speed. Most DSL connections in Australia are now around 20 mbits per second, so multiple DSL users would cause your server to be bottle necked by the port speed if you had a 10 mbit or 100mbit port. Always ensure that this is checked before committing to a server and it’s also good to do speed tests of the providers server before purchasing.

Disk Speed

When buying a server to be hosted, the speed and quality of the disks is the most important part of the server, as without fast functioning disks the server will come to a grinding halt since all information is read from the disks. View our SSD dedicated server page for more information on the performance difference between SSDs and HDDs.

There is no doubt that processors are getting faster. It seems each month new families of CPU’s are released that are more efficient, more powerful and are cheaper than its predecessors. In this article I will be referring to a scoring system based on a favoured website of mine, www.cpubenchmark.net.

We are big fans of the new E5 CPU family, so we now include the E5 processors in the new Professional and Enterprise Dedicated Servers range. In our professional range, we start with Xeon E5-2609 2.4GHz. However if you want the big guns, keep reading on to check out the Dual Xeon E5-2687 3.1GHz CPU’s.

Your everyday computer or laptop you buy would receive a performance score of about 3000 to 4000. This represents the score range of an Intel i5 2540M (3862 score to be exact). Now this is a good enough score to do everyday tasks on a PC, plus a little bit extra. However, a dedicated server needs more power than that. Intel’s new E5 processors are powerful, very powerful. So powerful in fact, in a dedicated server running only one of these processors it would be able to outperform many multi-cpu servers. To make things clear, a ‘Quad AMD Opteron 6272’ gets a score of 32 450. Don’t get me wrong, that is an extremely powerful system combining four ‘16 core’ processors (64 cores in total), however, a Dual CPU Xeon E5-2687W (16 cores) receives a score of 33 357. That’s 907 points MORE with 48 LESS cores.

This raises the question; does anyone actually need this level or performance? Well, some people do and others don’t. It all depends on the requirements of your dedicated server. Only a very small percentage of people seem to need powerful servers. At Servers Australia we can order this beast of a processor in for you, if you need it of course.

Put simply, this CPU raises the standards of processing power and allows dedicated servers to reach new levels of extreme performance.

Everybody loves cake, right? It was recently Jared’s birthday (our MD), and following the unwritten law of ‘always celebrating a birthday’, we threw him a staff party in our conference room with an amazing cake! After scrounging around for some old computer hardware lying around the office we built a Dedi-cake-ed Server! (talk about bad puns there… lol!).

We fitted the cake with old Xeon CPUs, laptop RAM, a USB stick and more. It was a big success with everyone racing to take a component. We made sure to wash the parts in the dishwasher first to ensure the cake was OK to eat, then we all got suck in!

We think this was a suitable way to celebrate the Boss’ birthday. Three cheers for Jared!

We are excited to announce our new special offers at Servers Australia for March 2012.

Mad as a March hare? Yes we are! We are offering DOUBLE RAM & DOUBLE DATA on all our complete Starter Dedicated Servers Series for the whole of March! There are no limits of purchases per customer either, however this is not available as an upgrade option. See our Starter Dedicated Server range here for a breakdown on dedicated server details and options. Offer ends on 31/03/12.

We are also offering 75% off Business and Reseller Web Hosting to our Facebook friends. Available on all web hosting packages for the first six month subscription to new customers only. This is available exclusively through Facebook, so head over to Facebook here, join our ‘friends’ and keep an eye out for the promo code which we will post on our wall, randomly over March. You’ll need to punch the promo code into your order form to redeem the offer. Offer ends on 31/03/12.

Also, just a ‘heads-up’ our $40 per Mbit on all IP Transit Services for new customers ends on 13/03/12!

Call us on 1300 788 862 or email sales@serversaustralia.com.au if you have any questons. All special offers, and terms and conditions are available at our Servers Australia Special Offers page here.

Servers Australia are offering free web hosting for life, to all Australian businesses. Go to our Facebook Free Web Hosting Page, ‘Like us’ then signup to receive your free web hosting. Please note this is available for businesses only and a limit of one per customer applies. Offer ends on 29/02/2012.

We are also having a $40 per Mbit on all IP Transit Services Sale. This service can be used for Dedicated Servers, Co-location or directly by interconnecting at one of our POP’s in Global Switch, Equinix SY1, Equinix SY2, Equinix SY3 or the Servers Australia DC. Available to new customers for 12 month (minimum) signups, available till 13/03/12.

We are also offering triple RAM on i3 server and E3-1225, Double RAM on E3-1245 Server. See our dedicated servers page here for a breakdown on the server details. Offer ends 29/02/12.

Details on all our current special offers are available on Servers Australia Special Offers page here.

SSD RAID 10 IOPS Testing – H700 Perc RAID Card Testing R710

Recently we’ve been playing with H700 RAID cards with SSD’s. We have had some issues which will be outlined in future follow up posts with SSD’s & H700 Compatibilities.

6 x 256GB Crucial M4 Firmware 0309 all confirmed in a RAID 10 array.
Testing tool : Fio 1.38 64bit

Fio is quite easy to configure and setup in all major linux distribution. We are testing it on Debian which is quite easy to install J  From CLI (command line interface) just run the following commands:

This will update the Package Index. The APT package index is essentially a database of available packages from the repositories defined in the /etc/apt/sources.list file.

To update the local package index with the latest changes made in repositories,
root@server:/# Apt-get update

This command will then install FIO from the remote repositories & any dependencies
root@server:/# Apt-get install fio

We then want to create the actual configuration file which will have all the variables for this test , because we are utilising SSD’s it’s a good idea to setup the configuration file with the following settings

The easiest way to create the configuration file is like this:
root@server:/# nano random.fio

Then you want to paste the following in:

[random]
rw=randread
size=1g
directory=/iops
iodepth=403
direct=1
blocksize=4k
numjobs=16
nrfiles=1
group_reporting
ioengine=sync
loops=1

The second last step is to create a folder where all the working/testing will take place in , in our case we created /iops in the following way:
root@server:/# mkdir /iops

The final step is the actual test J  just run the application with the configuration file name trailing
root@server:/# fio random.fio

And your output should be something like this. I have highlights the main performance outputs for you in red to compare your results! So we got roughly 19,000IOPS @ 4K Reads J Quite fast if you ask me

random: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=403
…
random: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=403
Starting 8 processes
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
Jobs: 2 (f=2): [_r__r___] [97.3% done] [34022K/0K /s] [8306/0 iops] [eta 00m:03s
Jobs: 2 (f=2): [_r__r___] [98.2% done] [25875K/0K /s] [6317/0 iops] [eta 00m:02s
Jobs: 2 (f=2): [_r__r___] [100.0% done] [25381K/0K /s] [6196/0 iops] [eta 00m:00
random: (groupid=0, jobs=8): err= 0: pid=3884
read : io=8192MB, bw=75793KB/s, iops=18948, runt=110678msec
clat (usec): min=82, max=39244, avg=282.17, stdev=70.87
bw (KB/s) : min=  336, max=20720, per=18.60%, avg=14099.28, stdev=930.13
cpu          : usr=2.51%, sys=32.11%, ctx=2077702, majf=0, minf=588
IO depths    : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
submit    : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
complete  : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
issued r/w: total=2097152/0, short=0/0
lat (usec): 100=0.02%, 250=7.38%, 500=81.68%, 750=10.65%, 1000=0.14%
lat (msec): 2=0.10%, 4=0.01%, 10=0.01%, 20=0.01%, 50=0.01%
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: io=8192MB, aggrb=75792KB/s, minb=77611KB/s, maxb=77611KB/s, mint=110678 msec, maxt=110678msec
Disk stats (read/write):
dm-0: ios=2097110/1826990, merge=0/0, ticks=606753/2981152, in_queue=3673756, util=84.49%, aggrios=0/0, aggrmerge=0/0, aggrticks=0/0, aggrin_queue=0, aggrutil=0.00%
sda: ios=0/0, merge=0/0, ticks=0/0, in_queue=0, util=-nan%

If you can benefit from free web hosting, a free server, savings on data storage or would like to get your hands on a free iPad 2, Servers Australia could be your best friend this Christmas!

Servers Australia are rewarding our Facebook friends by giving away free web hosting to friends with an ABN. Our free web hosting includes 500MB Disk Space, 5 GB Data Transfer, cPanel Control Panel and more. Visit Servers Australia Facebook page to sign up for your free web hosting today.

It’s no secret that successful businesses and enterprises perform best with fast, secure and reliable servers. Add to your current server network or get your very first server for free and enter the draw to win a dedicated server here.

If you’re looking to expand your business and need more data space, we’re cutting your costs. Servers Australia are dismissing the setup fee for all new Equinix SYD3 Colocation customers until 20/12/12. You’ve one more week to jump on this special offer, saving you up to $199. See our website for more information.

We are giving away iPad 2 tablets! Servers Australia are giving away, one-for-one iPad 2′s with every E3-1245 starter series server or higher on a 24 month contract. That means if you buy 10 servers you get 10 iPad 2′s! See our servers series here.

Unlike Santa, we’re giving away these deals whether you’ve been naughty or nice -but we hope it’s the latter!

We are offering double bandwidth and double ram to new customer purchases of the ‘Starter Series’ of our Dedicated Servers range. With speed and reliability, our ‘Starter Series’ servers are top choice for entry-level mail server, application server, database or web servers. See Servers Australia website for complete details on our ‘Starter Series’.

Also, as part of our Equinix SYD3 Launch Promotion, we are giving away 50GB free data per 1RU, saving up to $55.00 per RU. Backed by state-of-the-art security, network connectivity and redundant power, Equinix is the ideal location for your colocated equipment. See Servers Australia website for details on our ‘Equinix Colocation’. (Available to new colocation customers only.)

These special offers expire on the 10^th November, so be quick to take advantage of these deals. Call us on 1300 788 862 or email sales@serversaustralia.com.au.

It’s been a busy month at Servers Australia. Following the launch of Equinix Inc. ‘SY3’ in Sydney last week, we are now the proud owners of 12 x 32 Amp racks and are offering our new SY3 space from today onwards! Contact us for more information.

This month we are also pleased to announce our upgraded Intel starter series now with Xeon processes! These processors are impressively fast allowing for greater entry-level mail servers, application servers, databases or web servers! To see more go to our website.

Adding to these fab announcements we also have a special offer. We are giving away a ‘free.com.au’ domain name for all new Business Web Hosting accounts! Our Award winning Business Web Hosting includes:

• - Unlimited FTP Accounts
• - Unlimited E-mail Accounts
• - Phone Support
• -Daily account backups

All this and more for only $19.95 per month. Call us 1300 788 862 or email sales@serversaustralia.com.au. Offer ends 31^st August.

We are pleased to announce a new updated server range for our Starter Series. Based off your feedback we have increased our base ram and included three different options for storage including RAID 1, SSD and 1TB of Storage so now you can tailor your server even more for no extra charge!

And to help promote these new servers we are going to include some great limited time upgrades of DOUBLE RAM, and TRIPLE TRAFFIC.

Also be sure to keep an eye out on our blog and facebook as we will shortly be announcing new revised plans for our Professional and Enterprise series.

Last but not least we have been getting a lot of requests from people asking if we offer completely custom server builds. Well yes, we do and always have but to make it easier for you to request quotes we have added a new custom quote form to our website, which is in addition to our server configurator. You can visit the page by clicking here.