What kinds of servers benefit from 12+ core CPUs?

[Tech22]

Hello. Had a question: Which kind of servers actually use 12+ core cpus, as AMD and intel keep releasing more HCC models? Thank you!

[tt2468]

Just now, Tech22 said:

Hello. Had a question: Which kind of servers actually use 12+ core cpus, as AMD and intel keep releasing more HCC models? Thank you!

Mostly virtualization and some deep learning too.

[Enderman]

Virtualization, deep learning, computing, some types of rendering, protein folding, etc

[Tech22]

Just now, tt2468 said:

Mostly virtualization and some deep learning too.

What about file storage servers?

[leadeater]

Virtual server hosts where you need to have 30+ VMs running on a single server

Parallel compute loads, sort of refereed to as HPC

Database servers, but can depend on queries being run and/or concurrent user count

[tt2468]

Just now, Tech22 said:

What about file storage servers?

File storage doesn't take that much horsepower as long as it's configured correctly. Those crazy 32 core CPUs are not the same cpus you'd see in a storage server.

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Tech22 said:

What about file storage servers?

Generally no, if you have 24+ NVMe SSDs in the server and the storage protocol being used supports spreading across many cores then yea it can help.

[Tech22]

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

Generally no, if you have 24+ NVMe SSDs in the server and the storage protocol being used supports spreading across many cores then yea it can help.

Do hard drives need that too?

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Tech22 said:

Do hard drives need that too?

Not really, but that's a hard question to answer because it can depend. Not all storage servers and protocols have the same resource requirements and it greatly depends on your performance requirements.

 

If you have a storage server with a large amount of ram or nvram and the cache hit ratio is very good the number of HDDs or even SSDs won't even matter since everything is coming out of ram, to a certain point.

 

A general file server for storing documents is never really going to require much hardware resources even with a network that has a few thousand users. If however the storage server is for a virtual host cluster and needs to provide 60,000+ IOPs you're going to need 12-24 cores to deliver a consistent quality of service to the hosts.

 

Here is a general hardware history of Netapp storage controllers, for each generation you have to go to basically the highest models they offer before they bother putting a second CPU in the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp_filer#Model_history

[Tech22]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

Not really, but that's a hard question to answer because it can depend. Not all storage servers and protocols have the same resource requirements and it greatly depends on your performance requirements.

 

If you have a storage server with a large amount of ram or nvram and the cache hit ratio is very good the number of HDDs or even SSDs won't even matter since everything is coming out of ram, to a certain point.

 

A general file server for storing documents is never really going to require much hardware resources even with a network that has a few thousand users. If however the storage server is for a virtual host cluster and needs to provide 60,000+ IOPs you're going to need 12-24 cores to deliver a consistent quality of service to the hosts.

 

Here is a general hardware history of Netapp storage controllers, for each generation you have to go to basically the highest models they offer before they bother putting a second CPU in the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp_filer#Model_history

Thank you!