~Toughbooktalk~

1) From my heart: I just want to thank you all for all the continued help over the last 4+ years. Without each and every one of you guys we wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing here! This has been the biggest blessing in my life to see a community grow steadily over a period of time with NO STOPPING! I LOVE IT! I know that money is tight for EVERYONE. I’m not asking for a ton. Heck, I’m not even asking for anything if you can’t do it. ONLY, and ONLY if you can spare even $1 or even $2, that will help. If we can get 1,000 $1 donations, we have $1,000!! Even people that are just browsing, please help if you can! I have opened a dedicated short term account at my bank to put all the money into so nothing gets missed! I will also post the totals of what we have here but it WILL remain anonymous! Here is the link for that: DONATE HERE. All this money will stay together in a separate account. Total help needed: $1750 (Price is being beat by a different, trusted company and they can do $1750! (Updated 9/16/13)

2) Statistics: Before I go into nitty gritty, let me post some statistics that we should all be proud of: The traffic to the site for the last 4 years has increased to a level that this server can barely handle. We are around 2600 visit’s with 553 UNIQUE visitors and OVER 14,000 page views all in a month’s work!!!! 83.2% are repeat visitors and 16.8% are NEW VISITORS! This is simply amazing! Also, and this is the BIGGEST thing for us: The average time on the site is up to 8:26!!!! That’s simply amazing. With that being said: GOOD JOB EVERYONE! Honesty has always been my #1, and I mean #1 commitment! If anyone wants to know any specific stats or anything in more detail, I am MORE THAN willing to provide that in a private message!

3) Short story: The server we’ve been running on is about tapped out. The server was about 5 years old when I opened Toughbooktalk. Now we’re going on 9+ years of good reliable service! I had NO IDEA that we’d grow like we did! There is 3.01GB free on the Toughbooktalk drives out of a measly 279GB. 118.6GB is used for the OS and all the software. We cannot put any more drives in as they are the old school U320 drives. The server needs to be replaced after 9+ hard years of work! Not having enough storage for the generously uploaded recovery DVD’s and other great information that needs to be shared is just the start of our blessings! The other half is the traffic which I already posted above!

4) Proposed solution: The server that we need that will do what we need it to do and secure us for the next 8+ years: SEVER HERE a. Price: $1750 (Price is being beat by a different, trusted company and they can do $1750! (Updated 9/16/13)

5) Nitty gritty:

a. CPU: Dual Xeon E5430 Quad core, 3.0GHz CPU’s.

b. RAM: 16GB RAM. Q: Why only 16GB and now 32GB, 64GB or even 96GB. A: Websites are NOT memory demanding, they are hard drive demanding. The MOST we’re using right now on the old system is about 3GB out of the 4 that’s in it and that’s all allocated to the SQL server. The new system will need about 8GB or so to run. 16GB is PLENTY. RAM is easy and cheap to upgrade later too!

c. Hard Drives: 8 x 600GB 2.5” drives which will give a storage of about 2342GB (7 x 600GB = 4200GB – 7% overhead = 3906GB – 200GB for OS = A good solid 3.7TB of storage. Q: Why 2.5” drives? A: This is where servers are ALL heading and God forbid we need to upgrade again, this is the newest in which we can get. Q: Why 10,000 RPM drives and not 15,000 RPM drives? A: 15K drives are TWICE the price and we won’t take advantage of it because of the internet line we’re on.

d. Why this server and not this so and so brand instead? A: I’ve seen through time and time and time again that IBM just seems to run forever! More so than DELL or any other brand. What is there now is an IBM 346x. It’s OVER 9 years old and is still running Server 2003 Standard!

e. Back end support is still good. New router is installed. New 2TB backup SAN is running great with PLENTY of room thanks to all of you. The backup to the backup is gravy too!

6) Software: I’m not worried about because I have a Technet account with a free license to use.

7) What is in the future?:

a. Batteries on one of the backups (The main 3,000VA one) WILL need to be replaced in about 2 years or so (6/9/15). Not worried about that at ALL now because the secondary battery was just replaced 1 year back. This is cheap (Less than $200) maintenance cost.
b. Server will be moving into my dedicated server room at my new house that I will be purchasing in February (2/14). This will cut overhead costs by a TON.
c. Internet line will be upgraded to a 50M down and 10M up line when I move. We’re at 27M/7M now and were at 22M/5M about 2 years ago. Progression is just fine as we move forward.

We're at $2,616 donated.

$2,573.19 after Paypal fees.

This will be the official count post!

Just a note to express my appreciation for the use of this forum. I use the information available here on a daily basis. Also I have done a lot of buying and selling through the PM here. Easy to use ...I use it daily and often. Not as picky as other forums when I simply want to send a picture. (image)

Thanks to the contributors so far.

Good show Rob.

Jeff

Thanks for keeping this site up & running and sharing your experiences, tutorials, and all the useful stuff, throughout the years !

Just a suggestion for the server RAM: it uses DDR2 FB-DIMM, which in a couple of years will be obsoleted, and start to increase in price (~double the price for the same capacity compared to DDR3 - as it is now with DDR2 SODIMM vs DDR3).
From my experience, it never hurts to have more RAM (32GB), even if it's not used, apparently; that's because the OS uses it for read-caching (& writes, but in another story) - and I think the bulk of the traffic on the site are reads from the SQL & /uploads files - which could be already in RAM, so you get virtually instant access.
Keep in mind, the maybe in the not so distant future, you may upgrade that asymmetric internet line, to a fiber-optic line, and then, you (we ) will see a benefit in having faster reads/writes.
For now, you upload speed (our download) is the limiting factor.

So, after the entire amount is raised, if there are some $ left, you can use it for expanding memory.

You may also need to replace the 8K SAS controller's (http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0784.html#8k) battery backup at some time, it's rated for 3 yrs.
Not sure how old is the server you'll get.

Keep up the great work !

Thanks for the insite Gear!

Yeah, everything is on big batteries and generator anyways, so no worries there.

This server is DDR3, not DDR2.

are you sure about the RAM type ? if it's indeed the X3650 from the ebay link from your post, then it is DDR2 667 FB-DIMM, because the Intel 5000P chipset only supports DDR2 (FB-DIMM/Registered/ECC).

http://www-07.ibm.com/systems/includes/ ... 34USEN.pdf
http://ark.intel.com/products/27746/Int ... Controller

Not 100%... But this is what I was going from initially: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/rack/x3650m3/

I'll email the seller too

Great update:

I was able to reach out to IT Creations, which is the company we bought all our new Rugged Depot and they were able to BEAT the price of the EXACT same server and offer $1750 SHIPPED ground!

I will go with them once we get the money!

Thanks!

that's a different beast (x3650 M3 version) - it should have twice the memory bandwidth (DDR3, 1333Mhz, QPI - new architecture), six-core CPUs,
and more importantly, should lower you power bill (32nm, Integrated power gates: Allows reduction to idling cores at near-zero power)

it will cost more, initially, but on the long run, it will scale very easily (12 core/ 24 threads, 288GB max RAM, 16TB in 16x 2.5" bays, etc), and it's a current CPU/chipset generation.

(L.E. saw your update: maybe you can ask them for a quote on an M3 version too...)

Gear6 wrote:that's a different beast (x3650 M3 version) - it should have twice the memory bandwidth (DDR3, 1333Mhz, QPI - new architecture), six-core CPUs,
and more importantly, should lower you power bill (32nm, Integrated power gates: Allows reduction to idling cores at near-zero power)

it will cost more, initially, but on the long run, it will scale very easily (12 core/ 24 threads, 288GB max RAM, 16TB in 16x 2.5" bays, etc), and it's a current CPU/chipset generation.

(L.E. saw your update: maybe you can ask them for a quote on an M3 version too...)

My guy got back to be with this:

We're going to be at $2,895 for the M3 server with dual X5560 CPU's. I think that's more than we can handle... I'm trying to keep the costs down more.