So today we faced a situation where one level 3 opened his mouth and said virtualisation only has 5% performance loss when put against a standard OS on a physical dedicated server, so we decided to put these into some real world tests. The results are shocking to say the least. Hardware Specifications: Dell Poweredge R410 Enterprise Server Dual E5520 2.26Ghz 12GB DDR3 1066Mhz 4 x 300GB 15K SAS Drives in a RAID 10 Array. Perc6/i Hardware RAID Card with BBU Operating System Setup Setup One: ESXi 5.5 with Single instance of Ubuntu Server 13.04 with VMtools Installed (All resources assigned , 2 Processors with 8 Cores - 16 Cores total & 12GB memory) Setup Two: Bare install of Ubuntu Server 13.04 We decided to run some tests that are universally available to all readers to test this themselves so we decided to use www.serverbear.com. So lets get straight into the results UnixBench Processor Results: ESXi 5.5 with Ubuntu Server 13.04 UnixBench (w/ all processors) 3620.3 Ubuntu Server 13.04 UnixBench (w/ all processors) 5316.9 We are seeing almost a 32% drop in processor performance which left a few jaws dropped! I/O Results using IOPING: ESXi 5.5 with Ubuntu Server 13.04 I/O Seek Test (No Cache) - 7420 iops, 29.0 mb/s I/O Reads - Sequential - 1825 iops, 456.3 mb/s I/O Reads - Cached - 370452 iops, 1447.1 mb/s Ubuntu Server 13.04 I/O Seek Test (No Cache) - 9520 iops, 37.2 mb/s I/O Reads - Sequential - 2286 iops, 571.6 mb/s….

Servers Australia has gone as crazy as an Octopus, offering 8x data on Professional Dedicated Servers in our Vocus Data Centre. We’re not kidding, order a professional business dedicated server to be freely upgraded to 8TB of Monthly bandwidth! See our dedicated server specs below to see how much data you could add to your order. Professional Dedicated Server Intel Quad Core Xeon E5-1620 - 1000GB data NOW 8TB Intel Hex Core Xeon E5 2620 - 1000GB data NOW 8TB Intel Octo Core Xeon E5-2650 - 1000GB data NOW 8TB Want to give your new dedicated a massive upgrade with 8x more data? All you have to do is call us on 02 72015063, email us at [email protected] or visit our dedicated server page to order now. But be quick, this offer won’t last for long! Terms and Conditions: Sale only applies to Professional Dedicated Servers in the Vocus datacentre. Applies to new orders of dedicated servers only. Special does not apply to gaming servers on the gaming network. The 8x data special finishes 5pm 24th September 2013.      

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….

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….

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

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….

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 10th November, so be quick to take advantage of these deals. Call us on 02 72015063 or email [email protected].