CalPOP.com Unveils New Multi-Core Dedicated Servers

HostReview.com
Tuesday, February 20, 2007; 12:39 AM

CalPOP.com, the largest dedicated server company in Los Angeles, has unveiled several new multi-core dedicated servers including a Quad Core Intel dedicated server for only $199/month which includes unmetered bandwidth and free 24-hour support.

The Intel Quad core is like having four CPUs inside a single chip. "The Intel Quad core Q6600 CPU is so fast that many tests show it faster even then Xeon Core2Duo Woodcrest servers and Opterons," says Lynn Hoover, one of CalPOP's co-presidents. "This makes it an ideal solution for clients with heavy usage who might otherwise need two servers plus a load balancer to handle the same type of loads."

"Intel's timing has been amazing lately, and everyone has been really happy with these new multi-core intel servers. Intel released many new chips and there seems to be one for everyone. The combination of Intel's technology, timing, and pricing strategy has really put the screws on AMD -- and particularly our competitors whose dedicated servers are mostly AMD," says Evert Van Niekerk, another one of CalPOP's co-presidents.

"Having Apple switch to Intel's multi-core processors too only insures that Intel currently has the 'hippest' CPU for the time being in a never ending race for speed, performance and bragging rights between Intel and AMD," says Ross Thiers, CalPOP's third co-president.

"Another nice break in technology lately has been large disk drive sizes -- 750gigs with SATA2 bus speeds (300mb/s) are relatively inexpensive. Not long ago to get 750 gigs of space and fast speeds we had to chain several SCSI drives together with a fancy and expensive RAID5 card. Now with one relatively inexpensive 750 gig drive and perhaps another 750 gig drive for back-ups we can get better results for less money," says Thiers. (CalPOP uses Western Digital and Seagate brand hard drives finding both brands to be about equal in performance, reliability and value.)

"Many people are still just figuring out that IDE drives are obsolete -- turns out the IDE cable was the bottleneck -- something that might not have been noticeable with slower CPUs -- but with today's faster CPUs everything else needs faster bus sizes, too -- so that you don't have a fast CPU and a slow motherboard or hard drive. That's where SATA came into the picture. And now, the SATA2 drives are basically sending SCSI to the same retirement -- because they are faster than SCSI 160 and nearly as fast as SCSI U320 and yet they usually don't require a separate controller card and tend to be less expensive," says Lynn.

"We are not an Intel only provider, we are just stating that for the time being it seems that Intel is on top regarding CPUs. For example, lately we have been using mostly ASUS motherboards, finding that they usually support both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. When everyone wants AMD again, I'm sure we will be building those servers again, too," says Evert.