Consumers understand the importance of keeping their documents and other material possessions safe from unexpected disasters. Towards this, many invest in fireproof and waterproof safes. However, as the digital economy grows, many of the possessions such as documents and photo albums are in terms of bits and bytes, rather than tangible things which can be placed in safes. This brings to fore the necessity to find a disaster-proof safe place for those bits and bytes in both personal and business settings.

Storage media (hard disks, in particular) are quite sensitive to environmental conditions, and protecting them from disasters such as fires and floods is an interesting problem. ioSafe has been in the business of selling disaster proof storage solutions for the last 7 years. Their products have been well-reviewed and their CES demonstrations have always drawn a large audience. We have had the ioSafe SoloPRO 1TB USB 3.0 version in-house over the last month. To tell the truth, I spent more time reading up and understanding ioSafe's technology than actually testing out the drive. A number of other ioSafe reviews have already subjected their products to harsh conditions and proved that the hard drive inside is still salvageable. In this review, we will concentrate more on ioSafe's technology itself. Read on for our coverage.

Eight improved cores, 16 threads, integrated 40 lane PCIe 3.0: the new socket 2011 Xeon E5-2660 manages to package it all in a very modest power envelope of 95W TDP (at 2.2 GHz). If you read the Intel Xeon E5 paper specs, it becomes more and more likely that Intel has pulled off another "Nehalem": much better performance, richer features while consuming less power. Yes, as much as we like a good fight, the question is not whether Intel will outperform the competition and the previous Intel generation but by how much...

Intel sent us both the Xeon E5-2690 - their newest performance champ - and the more performance/watt oriented E5-2660. We managed to turn this last one into a chip that will perform like the Xeon E5-2630, a chip that is in the price range of the best Opteron 6200s. We compare Intel latest Xeon with the Xeon X5650, the Opteron 6276 and 6174. So whether you are searching for the performance champ, the best balance between performance and energy consumption or the best deal for your money, you should find an answer in this article. We improved our regular server performance testing with some HPC (LS-Dyna) and the renewed OLAP tests. Read on...

When we first looked at the Opteron 6276, our time was limited and we were only able to run our virtualization, compression, encryption, and rendering benchmarks. Most servers capable of running 20 or more cores/threads target the virtualization market, so that's a logical area to benchmark. The other benchmarks either test a small part of the server workload (compression and encryption) or represent a niche (e.g. rendering), but we included those benchmarks for a simple reason: they gave us additional insight into the performance profile of the Interlagos Opteron, they were easy to run, and last but not least those users/readers that use such applications still benefit.

Back in 2008, however, we discussed the elements of a thorough server review. Our list of important areas to test included ERP, OLTP, OLAP, Web, and Collaborative/E-mail applications. Looking at our initial Interlagos review, several of these are missing in action, but much has changed since 2008. The exploding core counts have made other bottlenecks (memory, I/O) much harder to overcome, the web application that we used back in 2009 stopped scaling beyond 12 cores due to lock contention problems, the Exchange benchmark turned out to be an absolute nightmare to scale beyond 8 threads, and the only manageable OLTP test—Swingbench Calling Circle—needed an increasing number of SSDs to scale.

The ballooning core counts have steadily made it harder and even next to impossible to benchmark applications on native Linux or Windows. Thus, we reacted the same way most companies have reacted: we virtualized our benchmark applications. It's only with a hypervisor that these multi-core monsters make sense in most enterprises, but there are always exceptions. Since quite a few of our readers still like seeing "native" Linux and Windows benchmarks, not to mention quite a few ERP, OLTP, and OLAP servers are still running without any form of virtualization, we took the time to complete our previous review and give the Opteron Interlagos another chance.

For the majority of the history of AnandTech we've hosted our own server infrastructure. A benefit of running our own infrastructure is that we're able to gain a lot of hands on experience with enterprise environments that we'd otherwise have to report on from a distance.

When I first started covering SSDs four years ago I became obsessed with the idea of migrating nearly every system over to something SSD based. The first to make the switch were our CPU testbeds. Moving away from mechanical drives ensured better benchmark consistency between runs as any variation in IO load was easily absorbed by the tremendous amount of headroom that an SSD offered. The holy grail of course was migrating all of the AnandTech servers over to SSDs. Over the years our servers seem to die in the following order: hard drives, power supplies, motherboards. We tend to stay on a hardware platform until the systems start showing the signs of their age (e.g. motherboards start dying), but that's usually long enough that we encounter an annoying number of hard drive failures. A well validated SSD should have a predictable failure rate, making it an ideal candidate for an enterprise environment where downtime is quite costly and in the case of a small business, very annoying.

Our most recent server move is a long story for a separate article but to summarize the move, we recently switched hosting providers and data centers. Our hardware was formerly on the east coast and the new datacenter is in the middle of the country. At our old host we were trying out a new cloud platform while our new home would be a mixture of a traditional back-end with a virtualized front-end. With a tight timetable for the move and no desire to deploy an easily portable solution at our old home before making the move we were faced with a difficult task: how do we physically move our servers half way across the country with minimal downtime?

Thankfully our new host had temporary hardware very similar in capabilities to our new infrastructure that they were willing to put the site on as we moved our hardware. The only exception was, as you might guess, a relative lack of SSDs. Our new hardware uses a combination of consumer and enterprise SSDs but our new host only had mechanical drives or consumer grade SSDs on tap (Intel SSD 320s).

In preparing for this move I realized we hadn't publicly discussed the performance and endurance issues associated with using consumer SSDs in an enterprise environment. What follows is a discussion of just that. Read on...

As promised in our last Opteron "Interlagos" review, we have been taking the time to deepen our understanding of AMD's newest Interlagos server platform and the "Bulldozer" architecture. Server reviewing remains a complex undertaking: some of the benchmarks take hours to set up and run, and power management policies, I/O subsystems and configuration settings can completely alter the outcome of a benchmark. That sounds very obvious right? It is not in practice.

Let me give you an example how subtle server benchmarking can be. One of the benchmarks missing in the original review was the MS SQL server benchmark, and for a reason. We did some extensive scaling benchmarks and our gut feeling told us that some of the results were a bit off the mark. So we kept the benchmark out of the original review until we pinpointed the problem.

Just a few days ago, we found out that a tiny bit of time-outs (1%, caused mostly by a data provider time out setting) can boost the results by about 20% erroneously as the actual workload is decreased. So our MS SQL server benchmark was not as accurate as we thought it was. Luckily we have solved all problems, and the benchmark is now more accurate than ever. You can expect to see the MS SQL server benchmarks on different server platforms and an in depth analysis in a forthcoming article.

While solving the MS SQL Server benchmark issues required a lot of testing, analysis and debate with Dieter, the lead developer of our stress testing tool vApus, we missed a more obvious tweak that could have improved our blender benchmarking. Luckily, we still have a community that is willing to give us valuable feedback. Greg Wereszko point out that our Blender benchmark cuts the render job up into only 64 tiles (X=8, Y=8). The result is that near the end of the test several cores are inactive, especially on the Interlagos Opteron (32 cores/threads).

So we increased the number of tiles beyond 8x8, to check if this improves performance on our 32 and 24 thread machines, and it did. (Quick note: the Blender benchmark on Windows is one of the worst benchmarks for the Opteron Interlagos, so see this as "worst case" performance point.)

Instead of trailing behind the Opteron 6174, the Opteron "Interlagos" 6276 manages to perform a tiny bit better than its older sibling when we use 256 (16x16) tiles. The Opteron 6276 improves performance by 24%, the Xeon X5650 and Opteron 6174 by 19%. 

Using more tiles, all CPUs are able to show their top performance. It also shows the rather "fragile performance profile" of the new Opteron. Many users are going to use standard settings and will never bother with this kind of tuning. As a result they are not going to use the full potential of the new Opteron. The Xeon's higher single-threaded performance makes it less vulnerable to less optimal software settings.

At the other side of the coin, once well tuned the Opteron 62xx offers an interesting performance per dollar ratio and this "fragile performance profile" may become very robust in FP intensive applications once the use of AVX gets widespread. We are taking quite a bit of time to make sure that the next server article can give more detailed information, but rest assured that we did not give up: we will update our server benchmarking...when it is finished.

Last month, AMD launched their Bulldozer architecture on desktops, and the result was rather underwhelming; however, there are plenty of indications that Bulldozer simply wasn't architected to excel at desktop use models. AMD's "Interlagos" Opteron is now available, doubling the core count of the desktop part and placing its sights firmly on the enterprise server market.

The massive Multi Chip Module (MCM) contains eight processor cores (“modules” as AMD likes to call them) and can process 16 integer and 16 floating point threads per cycle. Each of the 16 integer threads gets their own integer cluster, complete with integer executions units, a load/store unit, and an L1-data cache. The Cluster Multi-Threading (CMT) architecture of Bulldozer should be perfectly suited for server applications that are mostly limited by memory accesses and integer processing. The 16 floating point threads have to share eight clusters of two 128-bit FP units, but those units can process FMAC and AVX instructions; recompile your HPC application with an FMAC and/or AVX capable compiler and the chip could become an HPC monster as well.

Server applications also like large caches, and Interlagos has plenty of SRAM cells. The Interlagos package has 32MB cache onboard (L2 and exclusive L3 combined). If all caching fails, it can access four memory channels of DDR3-1600, good for 51.2GB/s of theoretical bandwidth per chip. AMD also added power gating to the cores, so inactive cores can enter a very deep (C6) sleep state and save quite a bit power. This should significantly reduce power in idle and light loads.

With all of that potential, the initial clock speeds that AMD could be fit inside a 115W TDP envelope are a bit underwhelming. The fastest 115W Interlagos part right now, the Opteron 6276, has a 2.3GHz base clock. The current Opteron 6276 reaches the same clock speed at the same TDP using a less advanced 45nm SOI process. However, the longer pipeline of the new Bulldozer architecture allows the chip to use Turbo Core to boost to 2.6GHz when running most server workloads, and if only half of the cores are active, the chip is capable of 3.2GHz.

The initial desktop launch of Zembezi may have left us wanting more, and Interlagos might offer that. For server workloads at least, this all looks very promising. Let's see what the first "Bulldozer" based Opterons can do.

Netgear's ReadyNAS lineup is well respected in the sub-$5K SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market. In November 2010, Netgear updated their Ultra lineup meant for the high-end prosumer / SOHO market. In the economical prosumer market, Netgear's last introduction was the ReadyNAS NV+ and ReadyNAS Duo in June 2008. Today, Netgear is launching the update to their economical prosumer lineup with the 2-bay ReadyNAS Duo v2 and 4-bay ReadyNAS NV+ v2.

The products being introduced today are the first Marvell based units from Netgear. We were given early access to the 2 TB version of the ReadyNAS NV+ v2. Read on for our review.

Facebook had 22 Million active users in the middle of 2007; fast forward to 2011 and the site now has 800 Million active users, with 400 million of them logging in every day. Facebook has grown exponentially, to say the least! To cope with this kind of exceptional growth and at the same time offer a reliable and cost effective service requires out of the box thinking. Through a combination of software optimizations and a careful selection of hardware, Facebook set out to create a platform that would meet their needs, and then they open sourced the design to the world.

The Facebook Open Compute server design was ambitious: “The result is a data center full of vanity free servers that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.” Even better is that Facebook Engineering sent a couple Open Compute servers to our lab for testing:

As a competing solution we have an HP DL380 G7 in the lab. Recall from our last server clash that the HP DL380 G7 was one of the most power efficient servers of 2010. Is a server "targeted at the cloud" and designed by Facebook engineering able to beat one of the best and most popular general purpose servers? That is the question we'll answer in this article.