Friday, August 10, 2012

Improved Server Performance & Reliability

Aberdeen’s New Stirling 277 Is VMware-Ready To Interoperate Seamlessly With Virtual Infrastructures

Reputations aren’t just handed out. They’re earned over time by gaining the trust of customers and partners through consistent results, leading performance, and long-lasting reliability.
Aberdeen has earned its well-deserved reputation within the industry as a manufacturer of affordable, durable, highly scalable, award-winning general purpose and storage servers by developing such trust. For 20-plus years, Santa Fe Springs, Calif.,-based Aberdeen has been building servers tailor-made to customers’ exact requirements and specifications in order to meet their present and future needs. Over that time, Aberdeen has also met and surpassed the criteria set down by its partners, including VMware. 

Solidified Reputation

The new Aberdeen Stirling 277, a 2U VMware-Ready server powered by the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 series CPUs and built on the Intel Romley platform, is but one of countless examples of how Aberdeen has solidified its reputation.
The Stirling 277’s VMware-Ready designation means the server can interoperate seamlessly with a virtual infrastructure and that it has met VMware integration and interoperability standards, says Mike McArthur, an engineer at Aberdeen. “Each VMware-Ready product and solution category requires successful completion of specific integration and interoperability testing,” he says. Beyond being VMware-Ready, the Stirling 277 is also certified for vSphere Fault Tolerance, meaning the potential of data loss due to disruption is eliminated.

“Customers can rely on VMware-Ready products and solutions to be reliably interoperable with a vSphere environment and to deliver unique features with significant value,” McArthur says. Further, he says, the designation signifies “VMware’s highest level of endorsement for products and solutions created by established partners.”
Overall, the Stirling 277’s hardware components make it well-suited for businesses running 10 to 20 virtual machines on a single ESXi server, McArthur says. The power and efficiency performance that the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 series CPUs provide means the Stirling 277 is also well-suited for cloud computing tasks, he says. Aberdeen offers the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 series in a dual-socket configuration. Built on Intel’s 32nm manufacturing technology, the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 helps companies meet the demands of developing efficient, secure, and high-performing data center infrastructure.

Better Hardware, Better Abilities

Among the Stirling 277’s standout features, says Niso Levitas, manager of research and development at Aberdeen, is support to configure more memory (up to 512GB), something that’s “important for virtualization,” he says. “Usually the bottleneck on VMware servers is the memory, not CPU,” he says. “You can add many more virtual machines with increased memory capacity.”
Aberdeen makes acquiring a virtualization platform “simple and affordable,” as well as free of “fancy terminology,” Levitas says, by offering two VMware virtualization starter kits. Both kits include two certified Stirling 277 servers providing shared storage and licensing abilities and hardware redundancy and VMware’s High Availability features. An Essentials Plus kit includes four CPUs and 128GB RAM and support for up to six CPUs and 192GB RAM. A Standard Acceleration kit includes four CPUs and 128GB RAM and support for up to eight CPUs and 256GB RAM.
Other notable features of the Stirling277 include dual onboard RJ45 10GbE ports and support for PCI-E 3.0. The 10GbE ports are backward-compatible with 1GbE networks and infrastructure, enabling customers to “utilize their existing network and switches and benefit from 10GbE when they are ready,” Levitas says. Seven available PCI-E 3.0 slots are built in, providing ample slots to add fiber storage ports, 10GbE, or iSCSI ports, Levitas says. The Stirling 277 can also utilize SAN storage, Levitas says, but supports up to 32TB storage in the server itself “for smaller setups or to utilize Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) features introduced with VMware Vsphere 5.0.”

Guaranteed Quality

As with every barebones and customized general-purpose and storage server Aberdeen sells in form factors covering 1U to 8U, the Stirling 277 ships with Aberdeen’s industry-leading five-year warranty that guarantees it to be free of material defects during the warranty’s duration and free of workmanship defects during the server’s lifetime.
Before shipping, every Stirling 277 server is put through a comprehensive burn-in process, as well as a thorough Quality Control/Quality Assurance routine. Before and after shipping, Aberdeen has VMware-certified sales and technical staff available to help customers best apply virtualization in their environment to cut their costs and simplify their operations. http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/stirling-277.htm