Seattle And Nehalem Processor on the Horizon

Seattle Washington has been an option for us to have a presence in for some time but we held off on it focusing on Dallas TX then to Washington DC.  At the end of this month unless something unanticipated happens we’re going to finally offer the option of Seattle for our shared and reseller hosting servers.  Seattle’s primary focus will be on serving markets that come to us via the west coast which means Asia.   We’re not sure when we’ll have a VPS offering there as virtual private servers are not near as popular due to their price so we’d rather give the shared and reseller market a try in Seattle first.  Seattle will of course have access to the features of all our other locations which means access to R1Soft backups and making use of our redundant DNS cluster.

The second portion of this post is to talk about the Nehalem processor which was released recently and we’ll have the option of using in the near future which could mean as soon as a few weeks from now when Seattle is launched.  The new Intel Xeon processor is much faster when compared to ones of a similar price.  We currently run Xeon 5430’s which are significantly slower compared to the new ones.   Here’s a benchmark that shows just how great these new processors are: http://is.gd/qSoR .  This is not a for sure though we’ll see what sort of deal we can get on them as well as the rest of configuration to make a decision on whether or not it’s smart to start using them now or not.  If we do plan on using them we could see 6GB ram minimum and as much as 12GB of ram on the servers.  The rest of the configuration would be the same as our newer machines with 10,000RPM 300GB raptor drives in raid-10 rather than the slower and older 250GB drives in raid-10 we were using previously.

That’s about all I have to talk about right now in a few weeks I’ll be sure to make a post mentioning we now Seattle and potentially new higher end configurations.