Haswell NUC as microserver?

[etherealfocus]

What do you guys think about using a Haswell NUC/Brix for WinServer 2008/2012? Duties would be Active Directory accounts for ~20 people and Quickbooks Enterprise 2013, primarily. No web duties or other CPU heavy stuff.

Currently we've got a server with Xeon 3430 with 4G RAM, 40G boot drive, and 2x500G HDs in RAID1. It eats a bit over 200W idle and generally the most intense things it does are serve Quickbooks and hold about 200G of total office files. Everything's backed up on Carbonite.

If we go with the NUC, the CPU should at least be competitive with such an old Xeon, and a single 500G SSD should be much more reliable than old HDs in RAID (and we've got Carbonite anyway). Power usage would drop over 90% (and we're out in the sticks so power's on the expensive side), performance and reliability would both improve significantly with the SSD, and we could sell the old server for I'd imagine at least 500 - enough to recover most of our initial investment right off the bat.

What do you guys think? We'd lose ECC memory and a few other niceties, but for a mission like this I'm not convinced it'd matter anyway. And with wins in power bill, performance, and reliability (minus the ECC issue) it sounds like a win to me. We'd get three years of warranty too... I'm sure the current server warranty is long expired.

 

[drebo]

Bad idea. RAID isn't a backup, it's for fault tolerance.

What happens when your SSD dies (note, these aren't more reliable than spindle-based hard drives) and you're stuck downloading your 200gb of files for a few days?

Seriously, if you're so poor that you are concerned with a server that uses 200W, you should probably just close up shop.

Removing redundancy does not increase reliability. It decreases it.

You're basically suggesting to run your business on a laptop. I can't even begin to explain the fail of this.

 

[etherealfocus]

Not a necessary expense, just a cheap upgrade. We're actually growing pretty fast.

You really think a good SSD isn't any more reliable than whatever HDs are in a server old enough to have an expired warranty? Seriously?

Forgot to mention our offline backup anyway - 1TB external HD only plugged in to copy files every day or two. Plus I routinely copy files to my laptop and to another guy's desktop. We have data redundancy all over - even if the office gets nuked, my laptop and the boss's laptop will survive, plus Carbonite.

Also I think the NUC components, being genuine Intel, are pry a little more reliable than a generic laptop.

 

[capeconsultant]

This is an interesting conversation. I have my eye on these little computers for the same purpose almost, at least with one client. He has an old dell XP clunker with like 2GB Ram and a 40 GB spinner. It serves QuickBooks is all.

Sounds to me like a good move. You seem to have plenty of redundancy. Me, I also image the drive once in awhile for fast recovery.

And as fond of spinners as I have been over the years, I much more enjoy using/working on SD computers. really. But one does need to get a "pro" level SSD I believe. Maybe not all the way Enterprise level (unless that IS what you need) but not the loss leader cheapest one either

 

[metril]

Seems like your data isn't important to you if you're backing it up onto your laptop and your boss' laptop.

ECC is important. You don't realize that a bit flip can screw up data. Especially financials. Forego the NUC. Spend the money and get a low power Xeon server. I seriously don't understand businesses that don't spend the money upfront to build a good infrastructure. It's utterly stupid to gimp on the infrastructure. A bad infrastructure will eat you alive when your guard is down.

OP, you need to do a lot of reading on the NUC, ECC, hard drives, SSDs, etc. From your two posts, it seems as though you are confused on "reliability". Reliability is an overall factor. Your system's reliability is as good as the weakest link.

 

[386DX]

First off if you think you'll get 500 for the old server with your specs you're probably being very optimistic. Old servers are a hard sell, large business never buy used servers, small business tend to buy cheap towers pretending to be servers, home users generally stay away from servers since they tend to be noisy and expensive to upgrade.

The NUC won't make a good server at all. If you're looking for a Micro server why don't you actually look at a micro servers. IMO the HP Proliant Gen8 Micro server will fit your needs. It's an ivy based system but shouldn't be an issue since performance between the two isn't much different. Best of all it's small (a bit bigger then a typical 4 bay NAS), cheap ($350-$400) for a celeron/Pentium, has all the basic server features (redundant NIC, ECC support, Raid controller, 4 easy access swap bays, iLO), low power (150W PSU), CPU is also socketed so you can swap it for a more powerful low power ivy based Xeon.

 

[etherealfocus]

Nice idea... except the Proliant Gen8 requires either insanely marked up OEM hard drives or slightly less insanely marked up OEM drive caddies that apparently have spotty at best real world availability. And more OEM tax for HP-branded memory.

Some reviews indicate that you can get away with generic hard drives and an error message about LED lights not being controlled, but that doesn't sound like a very good solution.

 

[jaydee]

Nice idea... except the Proliant Gen8 requires either insanely marked up OEM hard drives or slightly less insanely marked up OEM drive caddies that apparently have spotty at best real world availability. And more OEM tax for HP-branded memory.

Some reviews indicate that you can get away with generic hard drives and an error message about LED lights not being controlled, but that doesn't sound like a very good solution.

Can you elaborate on the OEM hard drives /caddies? Unless you're thinking he's talking about the SSA HD's?

I believe he's talking about this guy which takes conventional HD's, even SSD's with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter should work fine.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16859108028

 

[etherealfocus]

I was actually talking about the reviews here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scrollFullInfo

But it looks like they apply to all the Gen8s.

 

[Dahak]

I think 386DX was talking about the Proliant Gen8 Microserver specifically here, quick review

which starts at about 549 for the pentium based one, comes with all 4 caddies and you can use any type of hard drives

 

[etherealfocus]

Ahh, that helps a lot although I expect we'll still be paying a premium for HP memory? 2GB isn't gonna cut it - the current server has 4GB with 2-3GB usually in use. And considering that we're bringing in a steady trickle of new people, we should probably go with 8GB for future-proofing.

Also not sure if a 2C/2T CPU will work for us - our office has I believe 15 QBE users (luckily I'm not one of them), many of which use it pretty heavily throughout the day (and again, new people are trickling in). Shouldn't need much single-thread performance, but having 4-8 moderate threads might be useful. I don't know much about QBE though - thoughts? We might actually be a candidate for a Kabini/Atom 4-8T server.

I'm sold on ECC btw - fair point about bit flipping.

Don't wanna cheap out, but any smart cost savings is a good thing. We've kind of hammered the tech budget recently between launching a web store with a custom API integration, hiring a high-end SEO firm (seo.com), new employees, and fairly nice new laptops or dual 24" monitor desktops for everyone.

Whatever the case, an SSD would be really nice for making sure everyone has speedy QBE and network access while 3-4 of us are moving big files around. No better way to make 100BT feel like 10BT than a fat nonsequential file transfer.

Will the Gen8 you linked to handle standard 2.5" SSDs alright? That was a complaint in several reviews I've seen. And any particular SSD you'd recommend for our use case? Most anything will be stupid fast compared to our current system; I'm mostly concerned with long-term reliability and relatively civilized pricing.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167156

That looks like a decent starting place, but what's with the terrible IOPS?

 

[piasabird]

No hard drive? These things aren't cheap you still have to purchase RAM an OS and hard drive and maybe a wireless card and maybe plus they all use lousy Mobile processor and you need a wireless keyboard or mini-keyboard.

 

[etherealfocus]

Right now we're ok on 4GB and the one above comes with 2GB so I figure adding another 4GB stick will get us to 6... should be sufficient breathing room for at least a year or two. Already got a Server 2008 license so we're covered there. No need for a wifi card.

I'd love to go pure SSD if possible, but you're right about the expense. Dunno... I guess it depends how much we'd have to spend. There's been some talk of migrating to cloud-based accounting... security concerns aside, that'd reduce our server load to basically just Active Directory, fileserving, and backup. At that point we could probably get by comfortably with a 480G SSD and lightweight CPU. Maybe even a 64-80G boot + 256G storage if we're careful about not storing junk on it.

 

[jaydee]

I re-read your original post, it seems you have enough CPU power as it is, you just want faster I/O and lower power bill, correct? The CPU you said you have Xeon 3430, is only a 95W TDP, so if you're drawing 200W at idle, you've got something else going on here, probably a fairly inefficient PSU.

What if you bought a new PSU and upgraded your HD to an SSD, bet you can cut your power draw dramatically and increase I/O without a full rebuild. If/when you want to do a full new build you can carry over the SSD. Assuming your server can take a full ATX PSU, consider the following upgrade to your existing server:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817151117

and

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820248033
or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147250
or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167156

 

[etherealfocus]

I'm a little surprised you'd recommend the EVO over the 840 Pro, but sounds solid in general. For some reason I was thinking the Xeon was a 125W chip, not that it makes a big RW difference when the CPU only breaks 50% utilization for short spikes a few times a day on average. Good call on the partial replacement. Will talk it over and see what the boss thinks.

 

[Towlie]

If you want a low powered server, build on into a 4 bay i3 mini-itx system. Similar profile to NUC with redundancy.

 

[jaydee]

I'm a little surprised you'd recommend the EVO over the 840 Pro, but sounds solid in general. For some reason I was thinking the Xeon was a 125W chip, not that it makes a big RW difference when the CPU only breaks 50% utilization for short spikes a few times a day on average. Good call on the partial replacement. Will talk it over and see what the boss thinks.

What you've got is a Lynnfield CPU, basically a slightly lower clocked i5-750. In the AT review of it back 4 years ago, Anand recorded an idle power draw of ~85W for the entire system:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2832/17

As far as the SSD, I'd probably lean towards the Intel, then the Seagate Pro, then the Samsung, but that's also going from most expensive to least, so you get what you pay for. The Intel and Seagate get 5 year warranties.

 

[ultimatebob]

Yeah, you really seem to be missing the point of RAID. It's not meant to be a backup... it's meant to keep the server running without data loss in the event of a hard drive failure.

Trust me... you'll wish that you would have ponied up the extra money for a "real" server when you're business is down for a few days while you attempt to restore MOST of your data from a cloud backup solution. Those things are never 100% reliable, as backups often fail on files that are in use at the time of the backup.

Besides, you want something that's going to have identical replacement parts available for the lifetime of the server. You're not going to get that with a NUC, where they have a new model available every year.

 

[etherealfocus]

Agreed on Intel>Seagate>Samsung, except that as far as I'm aware Seagate is still a bit of a newbie in the SSD field and their 600 series hasn't been around all that long. One of the reasons I'd favor the 840 Pro is that it's already been around for long enough to have all the quirks worked out. And of course Intel's got stupid amounts of money to throw at product testing.

The thing with RAID is that the likelihood of a drive failure especially on a new SSD is pretty tiny... but we're in a rural area in Texas, and the risk of dirty power or something taking out our entire server is comparably large. We have a quality UPS of course, but I'm pretty sure a lightning strike would take it out anyway. And then there are the other environmental risks-tornado, fire, etc.

AND then there are the virus risks. We've got 15 people with access to QBE and other important company data. Of them, myself and the company president are the only ones with any level of technical sophistication. Everyone else... it's a struggle to get them to install Java/Adobe updates. I'm kinda shocked we haven't been hit with major virus issues yet. Anyway, given the above, my thinking on backup priorities is as follows:

1. Offline backup alternating between several devices in case a virus isn't noticed for a while. For that, we have the aforementioned backups to several reliable machines as well as an external hard drive. I'm donating the hard drive from my laptop (since I got an SSD for it) to a second offline backup HD so we can swap between them.

2. Offsite backup (Carbonite) in case of power surge/tornado/theft/etc.

3. Single drive failure protection, ie RAID. Again, it's not that drives can't fail; it's that there are far bigger risks... and good offline backup largely duplicates RAID functionality anyway. The most we can lose with cycling offline backups is a single day of data, and we could do it even more often if needed. I guess that'd be the downside of an SSD - RAIDing a hard drive costs an extra 100ish; RAIDing a 500G enterprise SSD is a hair pricier.