I forgot to make a video about this $150,000 server

[AlexTheGreatish]

During a round of spring cleaning we found a heavy box with an expensive surprise, Optane!

 

 

 

[BoomerDutch]

Woo weird flex but ok

[filpo]

10 minutes ago, AlexTheGreatish said:

Optane

Never thought I’d hear that in 2024, but looks cool!

 

ill just start saving up for 420 years and I should be 5% of the way to getting that server!

[ToboRobot]

Looking forward to seeing the expressed vs revealed preferences of thumbnails.

[OmniAdmin]

Not sure what this server might actually be used for? Here's a thought as a software architect: session state database.
There's a lot of ways to scale and load balance a site with authenticated sessions. For example, you can do sticky sessions or round-robin. With sticky sessions, the load balancer sets a cookie which directs the load balancer to direct that user to the same server on each subsequent request. That approach is fairly efficient due to the quicker routing. The problem with that is... if one of the servers in the pool goes down, everyone who was "stuck" to that server loses their session. If you go with round-robin load balancing, you can lose a server and still be fine, but then the problem is session state. How does each of the servers in the pool know the current state of this user's logged-in session? One of the options is a session state database. Upon user request to an application server, the application server requests the current session info from the database using the provided cookie token. The session info is extremely small, usually containing things like display name, permissions, and other minor persistent data, which would be perfect for Optane. This usage doesn't need top-speed sequential reads and writes. It would be much better to have super-low latency random read to hand out a few bytes of session data to pools of servers.
In a .NET web application, one of the options available is to use Microsoft SQL Server as a session cache. MSSQL itself can be setup to be highly redundant as well with failover clusters or other mitigation, so that this critical piece of the architecture is not a potential failure. Let's say you didn't even have ANY redundancy on this database server. It would STILL be a win to use Optane because of the non-volatile storage. The current alternate solution built into MSSQL is called "In-Memory OLTP", which is basically putting your database file on a ram disk, completely in memory. If the server crashes or you lose power, then you lost data and everyone's sessions just got reset and logged out. If you had Optane instead, those sessions could have been saved on persistent storage and everyone could resume right where they left off. Optane is also much cheaper than ram apparently, so it is a great use case for this situation comparatively.
Granted there's other options available, such as getting faster NVME drives or having deep pockets to buy tons of memory, but I think Optane would be a good fit for a mid-sized web application.

[Count_MHM]

12*50=600 not 6000 (2:44)

[IanSzot]

6TB of RAM, that's probably enough for a modded minecraft server

[Needfuldoer]

Not sure what to do with it? Send it to Jeff from Craft Computing; enterprise gear that's old enough to have cycled out of datacenters is his bread and butter! (And he's a Floatplane creator.)

[dogwitch]

On 3/28/2024 at 3:31 PM, Needfuldoer said:

Not sure what to do with it? Send it to Jeff from Craft Computing; enterprise gear that's old enough to have cycled out of datacenters is his bread and butter! (And he's a Floatplane creator.)

send him more of the failed ps5 chip nodes......

that almost broke him.