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Simon Besteman is a French and Dutch national, and a veteran of the ICT and data center industry. He has over 20 years of experience working at ISPs, suppliers, and data centers and as a management consultant for a wide range of organizations. Simon has held various senior management positions in multinational companies in the areas of service, sales and marketing, operations management, and strategic development.
Currently, Simon is the Managing Director of the Dutch Cloud Community, the Dutch coalition of hosting providers. As a leading representative of the industry, he is a frequent blogger on industry and policy matters, a keynote speaker at congresses and conferences, and a participant at Dutch government round tables on matters relating to telecommunications, data centers, and internet regulation. He sits on the boards of various industry groups, with a focus on education, employment, and governance.
Within data centers, we have seen a unique set of circumstances recently when it comes to IT infrastructure. Inflation, rising energy costs, and long lead times for new servers have caused many data centers and cloud providers to put expansion projects on hold or cancel them altogether.
However, the current cost and availability challenges for new servers, compounded with the high energy rates and the difficulty of sourcing certain components, gives data centers and users a real incentive to explore whether they can get more service out of their existing hardware.
With the high pricing point of new platforms and the added expense of new CPUs and cooling systems, investing in upgrades for your current setup may be a better choice. As such, many are upgrading existing hardware as a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly option vs. buying the latest platform. Here, we discuss the options and what to look out for.
Before upgrading, it is important to identify the performance bottlenecks in your current setup for your specific application. One potential bottleneck may be memory usage.
Note that fully populating the memory socket can affect the memory bandwidth. Memory is always a trade-off between speed and capacity. Think of it as a road with traffic made of trucks that carry a large volume of goods at low speed, and high-performance sports cars that have little space for luggage but can travel at high speeds.
The model of your CPU and the server platform, as well as the way memory modules are populated within the server, can affect the bandwidth. In most cases, higher memory bandwidth can be reached by only populating 1 DIMM per channel (1DPC). Adding a second DIMM per channel often results in the memory clocking down. However, insufficient memory capacity in your system may have a higher impact on performance than lower memory bandwidth.
If your servers have free memory sockets, adding extra memory modules or upgrading to higher bandwidth memory modules (such as DDR4 3200MT/s) may improve performance. However, it is important to always follow the memory population guidelines provided by the system manufacturer for optimal performance and to reduce the risk of stability or compatibility issues.
Here are a few important considerations before upgrading your hardware:
That said, replacing all HDDs may not be suitable for your application or may be too pricey. Therefore, using SATA SSDs for caching and HDDs for high-capacity cold storage may be enough (again, this will depend on your application).
Replacing HDDs with SATA SSDs is straightforward as they use the same interface and communication protocol (AHCI). But when considering using PCIe NVMe SSDs there are a few things to keep in mind:
For even better QoS (IOPS consistency and low latency), it is better to consider PCIe NVMe SSDs as caching or for full storage pools. The performance difference between SATA AHCI and PCIe NVMe SSDs is impressive and can be critical for latency-sensitive workloads and applications such as AI, machine learning, online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, big data analytics, cloud computing, operational databases (ODB), database applications, and data warehousing. You can read more about NVMe from Kingston: The benefits of NVMe in Enterprise.
In addition to upgrading the memory/storage, there are other steps that can be taken to extend the life of a server. While obvious to some, it does not make these steps any less vital! Regular maintenance, such as cleaning the server, checking for dust build-up, and updating the server's software and drivers, makes a substantial difference to both performance and longevity. It is also important to monitor the server's performance and usage to ensure it is running at optimal levels.
Kingston Ask an Expert can help you identify the best memory or storage solution for your existing hardware setup.
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Planning the right solution requires an understanding of your project and system requirements. Let Kingston's experts guide you.
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