Sometimes you just need some physical hardware

We’ve been doing some really cool things in Azure recently with some of our clients as well as hosting our own websites in Azure pretty successfully.  But we decided that sometimes just having some physical hardware comes in handy sometimes, especially when you want to build out weird or large environments to test things for customers.  And sometimes the cloud just isn’t the right place to try and do all that.

Well, thankfully Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting doesn’t have to just want to do this anymore.  We’ve just built out a brand new hosting environment in a CoLo here in downtown Los Angeles.  As lab environments go it’s a pretty nice config.  We’ve got 32 physical cores, 432 Gigs of RAM (which we’ll be upgrading later to 576) spread across 4 physical hosts, and ~20 TB of Tintri SAN space.

Given that testing out most workloads doesn’t take a whole lot of CPU power or RAM, we can easily run 100+ VMs (less if we need some actual resources).

We’re configured to be able to test show multi-subnet clustering just like in a multi-site environment and just about any on-premises configuration that a client wants to see.

This is just one of the benefits that we are bringing to our clients when we work with them.  If you want to be able to see how AGs work in an on-premises environment, or test out some weird replication configuration you don’t need to have the resources needed to spin all that up for that testing.  We’ve got the hardware and the software to help you do that testing.

I’m a big rebel, so I snuck a pic of the gear in the rack.  It’s amazing how much processing power you can shove into such a small space.  We’ve obviously got plenty of room to grow (if any other vendors want to see their storage in the pic, feel free to get in touch with us.  As our clients need more CPU power and RAM for testing out new configs for their systems we’ll just have to expand out the server farm.

It’s also amazing how big the boxes are to hold that little bit of hardware (scroll down for that pic).

Now you may be asking why don’t we just do all this in Azure?  And we could, but the reason we didn’t is pretty straight forward. Cost.  Building tons of VMs in Azure and leaving them running for a few weeks for customers can cost a decent amount pretty quickly, even with smaller VMs.  Here our cost is fixed.  As long as we don’t need another power circuit (we can probably triple the number of servers before that becomes an issue) the cost is fixed.  And if we need more power that’s not all that much per month to add on.

All and all, this will make a really nice resource for our customers to take advantage of, and give us a place to play with whatever we want without spending anything.

Denny

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