Threadripper 3970x server?

KeizzerSoze · 24 Feb 2020 at 16:42

Hi all,

Might seem like a silly question to some but here it goes.
What are the drawbacks of having an always on workstation with a threadripper 3970x, 128gb ram and 4tb Hdd in raid 1.

p.s I won't be paying for power consumption will be placed in a fully serviced office unit.

Would like to install windows server 2016 on the there and have 6/8 concurrent users using excel mainly.
what problems might I face if I were to go down this path?
Thanks in advance

Armageus · 24 Feb 2020 at 16:50

Seems like an odd set of requirements?

I assume by concurrent users you mean Remote Desktop Sessions?

Not sure what Excel spreadsheets you have, but 3970X/128GB Ram seem massively overkill.

You'd be better off not buying a server, and then using either Office 365 or Google Sheets and hosting the sheet in the cloud, which would also give you the benefits of concurrent editing (which traditional Excel doesn't do very well)

KeizzerSoze · 24 Feb 2020 at 16:55

Unfortunately due to the sensitive data we handle we cannot keep anything in the cloud.
And you assumed correctly Remote desktop sessions.

sideways14a · 24 Feb 2020 at 16:56

This is a job for Epyc aint it?

Minstadave · 24 Feb 2020 at 17:05

sideways14a said:
This is a job for Epyc aint it?

If you dont need vast amounts of memory bandwidth or silly numbers of PCIE lanes Threadripper does almost all of what Epyc does but a fair bit cheaper.

Armageus · 24 Feb 2020 at 18:33

sideways14a said:
This is a job for Epyc aint it?

It's a job for client pcs and a Nas to store the excel spreadsheets on, rather than an over specced server.

KeizzerSoze · 25 Feb 2020 at 15:45

Unfortunately staff can't store the data on their own machines or work on it outside of the server. everything needs to be done on a secure server.
staff would need to RDP into the machine to work on it.
£4k / £5k is not an issue for this project just want to know if this would be a decent server alternative if not what other options do you suggest for around
£5k budget something with 4tb of storage, 128gb of ram and decent cpu with 24 to 32 cores.

#Chri5# · 25 Feb 2020 at 16:31

How important to the business is the machine? What happens when if it dies? Have you factored in the cost of the Windows Server, CALs, RDP CALs and Office licenses?

Quartz · 25 Feb 2020 at 16:55

KeizzerSoze said:
What are the drawbacks of having an always on workstation with a threadripper 3970x, 128gb ram and 4tb Hdd in raid 1.

That sounds fine for a proof-of-concept but I think you need to consider the business side of this, particularly downtime and ease of management. Look at a proper Epyc server - dual PSUs, ILO, the works - from HP or whoever running Windows Server and Windows Terminal Services.

KeizzerSoze · 25 Feb 2020 at 16:57

#Chri5# said:
How important to the business is the machine? What happens when if it dies? Have you factored in the cost of the Windows Server, CALs, RDP CALs and Office licenses?

Yeah mate all that have been budgeted for accordingly, £5k is just the cost of the hardware.

KeizzerSoze · 25 Feb 2020 at 17:03

Quartz said:
That sounds fine for a proof-of-concept but I think you need to consider the business side of this, particularly downtime and ease of management. Look at a proper Epyc server - dual PSUs, ILO, the works - from HP or whoever running Windows Server and Windows Terminal Services.

I'll have a look at the epycs but don't think i'll be able to find anything near £5k - fingers crossed

khrall · 25 Feb 2020 at 21:59

It's been a while since I last looked at an RDS environment, but to echo what Armageus said, sounds like massive overkill for 6-8 sessions working on a spreadsheet.

I seem to recall that sessions would typically use 64-256MB RAM per session, but people would often allocate 2GB RAM per session, plus 4ish GB for the underlying OS. vCPU was also typically 8-10:1 consolidation per physical core. 32 cores and 128GB i would expect a 40-50 seat environment running from that, and still have plenty of CPU resource free!

Don't cheap out on the hardware, get a proper server, with redundancy and a decent support contract, especially if you intend on running a single physical server for this project.

KeizzerSoze · 2 Mar 2020 at 12:11

Thanks for all your advice, I ended up getting an AMD EPYC, tower server.
ended up costing around the same but without the Licence still need to buy a windows server 32 core licence.

Again thanks for all the advice.