AMD announce EPYC

Vince · 13 Aug 2019 at 13:31

For those of you that want to know...

If there is any issues at all with making any of this public mods please let me know. This should show the difference between 7702 64/128 and 7452 32/64 both server are equipped with 192gb memory at this stage. Mine are ordered and it shouldn't be a few days before they are here and ready to play with.

ChrisD. · 13 Aug 2019 at 13:37

Who did you buy them through? PM me if you want. I recognise the font/colours.

Vince · 13 Aug 2019 at 13:42

ChrisD. said:
Who did you buy them through? PM me if you want. I recognise the font/colours.

PM on the way.

jigger · 14 Aug 2019 at 12:37

Anyone considered Gigabyte?

Vince · 14 Aug 2019 at 14:25

jigger said:
Anyone considered Gigabyte?

I dunno for me the big providers like HP and Dell just cover all bases. I didn't even look at companies like gigabyte etc when planning out my estate upgrades. Perhaps an oversight on my end. Would be interested to know what you think if you have a look. Things like iLo etc are pretty useful to me so I tend to stick with what I know and that is HPe

I have a delivery date on my servers of next Friday so they will be on site on the 23rd.

humbug · 14 Aug 2019 at 14:31

Vince said:
I dunno for me the big providers like HP and Dell just cover all bases. I didn't even look at companies like gigabyte etc when planning out my estate upgrades. Perhaps an oversight on my end. Would be interested to know what you think if you have a look. Things like iLo etc are pretty useful to me so I tend to stick with what I know and that is HPe

I have a delivery date on my servers of next Friday so they will be on site on the 23rd.

For £71K i would be sticking with what i know too.

DragonQ · 14 Aug 2019 at 15:05

I just know that if we were to buy AMD servers at work and there were any problems, it would immediately be blamed on the fact that we didn't buy Intel servers, even if that wasn't at all relevant. We actually prefer Dell and HP too but for one of our products we need to use Asus because they're the only vendor to provide 8x full-height, full-length PCIe slots in 2U.

humbug · 14 Aug 2019 at 15:17

DragonQ said:
I just know that if we were to buy AMD servers at work and there were any problems, it would immediately be blamed on the fact that we didn't buy Intel servers, even if that wasn't at all relevant. We actually prefer Dell and HP too but for one of our products we need to use Asus because they're the only vendor to provide 8x full-height, full-length PCIe slots in 2U.

Which is why Intel now do a lot of marketing based around how long they have been doing it and how successful they are.

I watched the Rise and Fall of Nokia on BBC4 the other night.

They had this same attitude, snubbing their nose at out of the box thinking and new innovations, calling things like Touch Screens, Screen Swiping, Screen Orientation Correction, Apps..... "gimmicks" Steve Jobs didn't think these things were gimmicks.

Vince · 14 Aug 2019 at 17:37

DragonQ said:
I just know that if we were to buy AMD servers at work and there were any problems, it would immediately be blamed on the fact that we didn't buy Intel servers, even if that wasn't at all relevant. We actually prefer Dell and HP too but for one of our products we need to use Asus because they're the only vendor to provide 8x full-height, full-length PCIe slots in 2U.

Just own it.. that's what I'm doing, I really dont care if I hit problems and expect to tbh. The numbers speak for themselves, double the performance at less than half the price and power draw. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the numbers and see what the right route is, put them numbers in front of the right people and it will take seconds to convince them.

I've built 3 months lead in to simply get the estate built and process down but then I held off on Naples as I knew what Rome was going to deliver so the firm have had two years of me leaving 100k in the budget for the release and waxing lyrical about the numbers and technology at every given opportunity. I also migrated a load of our vm's onto my TR rig as a very loose proof of concept.

At the end of the day nobody above me so just the managing partner have a clue what I'm waffling about half the time but track record is everything and I genuinely believe they just trust I'll see them right and you can be sure that right now and for the foreseeable epyc is the right route.

Vince · 14 Aug 2019 at 17:41

humbug said:
For £71K i would be sticking with what i know too.

It's actually a bargain at that price for 3... I'm coing out with a stack of change that I will throw at all new FC switches.. this will be a huge upgrade for us, we are going from 6x xeon 5690 to 3x epycs, we will more than half the power draw, pretty much triple the core count and the roi makes it a very easy win.

ChrisD. · 14 Aug 2019 at 17:47

Then there's licencing costs to consider.

Vince · 14 Aug 2019 at 17:53

ChrisD. said:
Then there's licencing costs to consider.

I think, dont quote me on it, that vmware still license on socket so half price baby... well kinda... it does mean that bigger estates will be able to make use of vsphere essentials plus to bring those costs down. Right now I have 2 estates at two sites and both are licensed essentials plus and volume licensed on datacenter. I'm fairly sure that for me license costs remain much the same but in other environments savings could be more significant.

DragonQ · 14 Aug 2019 at 17:53

ChrisD. said:
Then there's licencing costs to consider.

Some application licences charge per core but you can normally get around that by using VMs.

ChrisD. · 14 Aug 2019 at 18:56

Vince said:
I think, dont quote me on it, that vmware still license on socket so half price baby... well kinda... it does mean that bigger estates will be able to make use of vsphere essentials plus to bring those costs down. Right now I have 2 estates at two sites and both are licensed essentials plus and volume licensed on datacenter. I'm fairly sure that for me license costs remain much the same but in other environments savings could be more significant.

Yes currently VMware is all per socket based.

DragonQ said:
Some application licences charge per core but you can normally get around that by using VMs.

I was more talking about the hypervisor.

Boot_Loop · 14 Aug 2019 at 19:18

Vince said:
At the end of the day nobody above me so just the managing partner have a clue what I'm waffling about half the time but track record is everything and I genuinely believe they just trust I'll see them right and you can be sure that right now and for the foreseeable epyc is the right route.

Well certainly it will take Intel years to catch up with these server parts.

henson0115 · 14 Aug 2019 at 19:29

humbug said:
For £71K i would be sticking with what i know too.

youd be paying a lot more on intel than £71k for the equivalent core count. literally the chips alone would likely cost more than those 3 systems fully built, thats bargain money for the ROI.

jigger · 17 Aug 2019 at 16:49

Vince said:
I dunno for me the big providers like HP and Dell just cover all bases. I didn't even look at companies like gigabyte etc when planning out my estate upgrades. Perhaps an oversight on my end. Would be interested to know what you think if you have a look. Things like iLo etc are pretty useful to me so I tend to stick with what I know and that is HPe

I have a delivery date on my servers of next Friday so they will be on site on the 23rd.

I'm toying with the idea as Gigabyte seem to have all the bases covered.

Vince · 17 Aug 2019 at 17:03

jigger said:
I'm toying with the idea as Gigabyte seem to have all the bases covered.

I shall give it a watch. The problem I have is that the company I work for work with the likes of HP, IBM, Global Foundries and some other tech companies doing things like IP, trademarks and litigation etc. To do what we do now for the companies that we do them for we often have to be audited, pen tested, fill out epic questionnaires to qualify as a supplier (hp/virgin i'm looking at you) and I often have my work scrutinised by both internal stakeholders and external specialists or "experts". It's fairly easy for me to Justify HP given the work we do with HP but to justify Gigabyte given they are comparatively not that well known could be an issue.

Doing what I do, every time it comes to an audit or external pen test the work that I do is put to test and if I get it wrong the implications are significant, everything from our development environments and the way we approach code to firewalls, network, the configuration of our vm estate, hardware selection, security stack etc, etc it's all there waiting to be the thing that strings me up. Epyc then is a bit of a risk but given what we know on Intels current issues and what we know about the security built into Epyc it's something that is easy to justify, tie that to the ROI and the alternative then it's a decision I'm comfortable with and that I'm happy to fight my corner on. I also believe that there is 10 years easily of growth in what I have bought.

* Having watched it you can't argue that the server is nice, for me though I couldn't care less about the storage back plane, modular design or connectivity options as ill be booting from a SD card and the servers will have no storage at all. The storage estate is all on a FC San so these will be 10Gb/s to FC switches and will be exposed to the VMware estate. I do need to work out how the migration is going to work which to be honest is really my only major question right now as there really isn't a massive amount of info out there and our vmware is on version 5.5 (yes because of vsphere classic client and a few other hardware related issues). Right now I'm thinking vmotion everything onto two intel boxes and then remove one intel from the estate. Introduce the first AMD box and move a few of my legacy servers or failed project servers and see what happens. A suck it and see approach! I have 3 months to work out a plan so let's hope it's easy enough.

andrewOC · 19 Aug 2019 at 14:43

Vince said:
For those of you that want to know...

If there is any issues at all with making any of this public mods please let me know. This should show the difference between 7702 64/128 and 7452 32/64 both server are equipped with 192gb memory at this stage. Mine are ordered and it shouldn't be a few days before they are here and ready to play with.

can you tell me exactly how/where you bought these? PM perhaps?
i cannot fond any epic romes on HP site.

dl380's which you linked to earlier are not AMD epic rome servers

Vince · 19 Aug 2019 at 14:44

andrewOC said:
can you tell me exactly how/where you bought these? PM perhaps?
i cannot fond any epic romes on HP site.

dl380's which you linked to earlier are not AMD epic rome servers

I linked to the orders and also invoices (which I later removed as there were a few bits of info I didn't really want public). You can't buy them until the 28th and you will have a 4 month lead time is what I am hearing.

I should have them on Friday but this is not something that is readily available to Joe public according to my contacts at HP (apologies for earlier comments as I was not aware of what was going on behind the scenes). Take from that what you will. I have been told but am not sure if I believe it, that I will be the first outside of the cloud providers at the likes of google/twitter to have EPYC Rome on site. Apparently the first consumer processed order according to a text I got from my pal at hp.

I'll put pictures up on Friday when they arrive. They are also HP DL385's not 380's. I can put you in touch with somebody who can give you pricing but they will not be able to process an order until the 28th.