At SecureWebs we build servers - usually a few each week and sometimes as high as ten. There are several considerations in determining what is the optimum server platform for our standard machine.  We won't keep you in suspense, our preference is the AMD Opteron™.  If you are a hosting company or even a corporate IT department with many of the same considerations we hope you find this article helpful in quantifying your decision to use the AMD Opteron™ Server.   At SecureWebs our network and server infrastructure "is" what we do and so we consider hardware decisions with great care and deliberation. 

If you buy an inexpensive switch or router, it will usually come back to haunt you.  However paying too much is equally dangerous for a business.  Our servers are priced lower than the competition and we feel we owe that advantage in large part to AMD.  Our turnover rate is very high on our servers - anything very old is given to the schools or just about anyone that can use a serviceable but older machine.  If you pay a high price for your servers, you have to justify them by using the machine for a longer period of time and that does not make you competitive in the hosting marketplace or anywhere else. 

Intel has dominated the marketplace for servers in the hosting industry.  If you doubt this go to any hosting company that rents dedicated servers and scan the hardware specification.  Xeon's, Celeron's, Pentium III's abound.  With the AMD Opteron™, AMD is focusing on the server marketplace and they are successfully changing this equation.  In the coming months you will be seeing many more servers based on the AMD Opteron™ processor. According to Forbes, they already have the dominant position in the desktop marketplace. 

For those like us who feel that we have to repair or replace a machine as soon as we recognize there is a problem we gain some comfort in the fact that we build all our own servers.

While most of our servers are modest in cost and size, on the other end of the spectrum AMD Opteron™ has caught on big with the high performance computing market.  For example, Cray's contract with Sandia Lab's where they are developing the Red Storm supercomputer predicted to be many times faster than their current supercomputer.  And the Cray X1 sounds interesting - when fully loaded it has 4,096 AMD Opteron™ processors and shared main memory up to 64 TB! 

While that is all very exciting, for the purpose of this article we will be building a single CPU based machine. Unlike the corporate IT department with data warehouses to service or the needs of the select few who can justify (or at least afford) a super computer hosting applications are typically run very adequately on a single processor server.  While we enjoy any excuse to build a bigger machine, we wanted to illustrate what is more typical for the millions of websites being hosted on the Internet today. 

Our definition of a "server" is loosely defined.  We will stop short of considering the Pentium, Celeron or XP as a server CPU, though in truth we have built servers out of all of them.  Of course, if you don't have reliability then no server can be inexpensive enough to consider.