# BuyVM announces free CPU upgades on all 256MB+ OVZ's in Las Vegas



## Francisco (Oct 4, 2014)

Hello Everyone!

Along with a slew of other freebies coming down the pipe, I just wanted to announce that starting next week we'll

be upgrading all 256MB+ plans in Las Vegas to E5 2630L's as well as upgrading the SSD caching we use on all 128MB

plans.

This upgrade is one of many freebies on the way in the coming month or so. I can't go into full detail on the

other things due, but I'm very excited to say the least 

Francisco


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## Nett (Oct 4, 2014)

How long will the downtime be? Being upgraded to E5 is nice, but I don't see many differences: http://ark.intel.com/compare/48766,64586


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## eva2000 (Oct 4, 2014)

sweet thanks for the freebies !

much less power usage and a good boost in ssl/encryption/aes-ni performance 

would be better if it was E5-2630Lv3 to gain Intel Secure Key support and 2 extra cores/4 threads http://ark.intel.com/compare/75791,83357,64586,48766

Intel Secure key will eventually come in handy when everyone starts transitioning from RSA 2048/4096 bit SSL certificates to ECC 256 bit SSL certificates with ECDSA signing

edit: yeah E5 v3 needs DDR4 so not a good in place upgrade... in such case E5-2630Lv2 would still have the new Intel Secure Key support which started with Ivy Bridge platform


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## Francisco (Oct 4, 2014)

Nett said:


> How long will the downtime be? Being upgraded to E5 is nice, but I don't see many differences: http://ark.intel.com/compare/48766,64586


We suspect about an hour.

We're just wanting to normalize our configurations between DC's since NJ has E5's and it helps in spots.

Francisco


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## Francisco (Oct 4, 2014)

eva2000 said:


> sweet thanks for the freebies !
> 
> much less power usage and a good boost in ssl/encryption/aes-ni performance
> 
> ...


I couldn't find any that were decent on power in the V3 series. Anything in the ~60 range was high core, low Mhz, which wouldn't be of much use to people. Below 2Ghz is simply dumb.

Some of the delays are due to firmware flashing and things like that. In the past year since the SSD upgrade Adaptec pushed out some fairly important updates (like fixing poor performance on NUMA/SMP boxes) so we're wanting to get those out at the same time.

Francisco


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## Nett (Oct 4, 2014)

E5v3 requires DDR4 RAM and new motherboards, which can be quite expensive.


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## MannDude (Oct 4, 2014)

Don't you know that you can make more money if you keep the same old hardware and just put twice as many containers on it?

purple = sarcasm


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## Francisco (Oct 4, 2014)

Nett said:


> E5v3 requires DDR4 RAM and new motherboards, which can be quite expensive.


I saw no reason to jump to V3's because of the RAM. The difference in performance simply wasn't enough to justify that big of a cost jump.

The L5638/L5639's are going to a different project anyway so it all works out nicely 

Francisco


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## willie (Oct 4, 2014)

Secure Key appears to be a hardware random number generator, definitely useful but not especially relevant to speeding up particular crypto algorithms.  AES-NI has been around for years, and SGX (a key encapsulation and signed code scheme) is not out yet.


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## ihatetonyy (Oct 4, 2014)

Very nice!

Though, I saw the thread title and half-expected to see "For immediate release" incorporated in somewhere..


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## bizzard (Oct 5, 2014)

Great! I wonder with all these upgrades, what you guys do with the old hardware.

@Francisco Is the formatting of the post intended, or a mistake?


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## Francisco (Oct 5, 2014)

bizzard said:


> Great! I wonder with all these upgrades, what you guys do with the old hardware.
> 
> @Francisco Is the formatting of the post intended, or a mistake?


Usually we just sell it. This time we have a use for some of it so it's going to that side project 

What's wrong with my formatting? 

Francisco


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## Nett (Oct 12, 2014)

My VPS got moved to E5 today with a ~50 minute downtime.


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## k0nsl (Oct 12, 2014)

Thanks for the upgrade, all good here. *Total downtime:* 59 minutes on the mark


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## signius (Oct 13, 2014)

Yet more free upgrades for Las Vegas customers yet you still not done any of the upgrades for New Jersey customers that you announced 10 months ago.

Maybe you should fulfill your obligation to carry out previously announced upgrades to customers first before throwing more money & effort at a location that has already received tonnes of upgrades, while neglecting your other location.

If you cannot actually carry out works & upgrades to a location then you should not announce them in the first place.


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## trewq (Oct 13, 2014)

signius said:


> Yet more free upgrades for Las Vegas customers yet you still not done any of the upgrades for New Jersey customers that you announced 10 months ago.
> 
> 
> Maybe you should fulfill your obligation to carry out previously announced upgrades to customers first before throwing more money & effort at a location that has already received tonnes of upgrades, while neglecting your other location.
> ...


I can't believe that you are mad because you're not getting free stuff quick enough.


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## signius (Oct 13, 2014)

10 months is hardly quick

I am saying that  if they have announced upgrades & services to customers (which they did almost a year ago) they should fulfill that obligation before going ahead with upgrades to another location that was not planned at the time of the previous announced upgrades to both locations.

My issue is not that i am not getting free stuff quick, it is that services were announced & were never fulfilled which is basically bait & switch.

If they did not have the ability to provide announced upgrade then they should not have announced them. I am glad for the LV customers but the customers at NJ are constantly getting the shitty end of the stick.


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## Francisco (Oct 13, 2014)

Nett said:


> My VPS got moved to E5 today with a ~50 minute downtime.


 


k0nsl said:


> Thanks for the upgrade, all good here. *Total downtime:* 59 minutes on the mark


Given BIOS updates, RAID card firmware updates, actual hardware replacements, etc, I think around 40 minutes for node bootup is about the best we can do  It's a lot better than the 2 hour window we were booking 



signius said:


> 10 months is hardly quick
> 
> I am saying that  if they have announced upgrades & services to customers (which they did almost a year ago) they should fulfill that obligation before going ahead with upgrades to another location that was not planned at the time of the previous announced upgrades to both locations.
> 
> ...


We never announced NJ upgrades, we simply said that they were on the TODO list. Any time we announce something there is almost always a very fast turn around for deployment.

NJ is a hard location for us to do due to power demands. Choopa was quite unreasonable with us when we were looking for power a few months back. It took them nearly 3 months to even get back to us and when they did it was hilariously over priced. Let me explain that a bit more. We needed power for a single node to act as temporary shuffle space while drives are swapped, etc.

They quoted us $100 for the power...and $200/m for a single ethernet cable to connect this single server back to our cabinet. On top of that there was a $300 setup fee all for a *single* server.

The total conversation spans about 5 months because the administrator I was talking to wouldn't respond. His own staff would keep passing the ticket back to him but he was too busy trying to do Vultr things I'm assuming.

Francisco


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## signius (Oct 13, 2014)

Appreciate the detailed explanation.

I would have thought Choopa would have been far more obliging & reasonable considering the amount of network outages & issues they have caused themselves.

I know you was put in an sticky situation by the mickey clowns at Colo-Crossing prior to the move to Choopa but i think the Choopa location looked good on paper but the reality has been less than impressive on a few occasions & it sounds like there is no room for improvement at that location :-/

Well im glad for the LV customers anyways


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## Nett (Oct 13, 2014)

Francisco said:


> Given BIOS updates, RAID card firmware updates, actual hardware replacements, etc, I think around 40 minutes for node bootup is about the best we can do  It's a lot better than the 2 hour window we were booking


Wouldn't it be better if you just install OpenVZ on the new node and migrate the VPS over using vzmigrate?


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## bizzard (Oct 13, 2014)

Francisco said:


> What's wrong with my formatting?


For me, the line breaks are at unusual places, like after "we'll" and "128MB" in the first paragraph and just before "other things" in the second paragraph.

Find the screenshot below:


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## Francisco (Oct 13, 2014)

signius said:


> Appreciate the detailed explanation.
> 
> I would have thought Choopa would have been far more obliging & reasonable considering the amount of network outages & issues they have caused themselves.
> 
> ...


Honestly, if I knew we'd have as many choopa caused network issues as we have, I'd probably have reconsidered the other offers I had in the area. The fact they were being so unreasonable hasn't helped.

Their V4 network is fantastic but for a company that prided itself on being V6 ready in the early 2000's they couldn't give lesser of a shit about it now. If v6 will not get the same love as V4 (for now) I wish they'd just say that and I'd put back up an HE BGP tunnel just for some reliability. We've had to ticket more than a half dozen times so far because nlayer/etc keeps dumping a ton of V6 routes for no reason.

NJ will get a lot of love in time. For the longest time NJ/NY got more love than LV given it got the newest CPU's on the market when we provisioned it as well as a lot of other stuff.



Nett said:


> Wouldn't it be better if you just install OpenVZ on the new node and migrate the VPS over using vzmigrate?


A tiny bit easier on customers but it'd take weeks to get everything migrated. You aren't going to ride gig+ the entire time those migrations are going especially when we have tons of customers with multiple millions of inodes.

We weighed the options and felt simply pulling things offline for < 1 hour was much easier and way more time efficient than configuring & migrating.

Francisco


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## Aldryic C'boas (Oct 13, 2014)

bizzard said:


> For me, the line breaks are at unusual places, like after "we'll" and "128MB" in the first paragraph and just before "other things" in the second paragraph.
> 
> Find the screenshot below:


That's just how Fran types - he does 'manual' returns rather than rely on wraparound.  Drives me absolutely nuts when he emails me


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## Francisco (Oct 13, 2014)

Aldryic C said:


> That's just how Fran types - he does 'manual' returns rather than rely on wraparound.  Drives me absolutely nuts when he emails me


Bite

My

Metal

Ass

>_>

Francisco


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## catatonic (Oct 13, 2014)

it isn't shiny?


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## Dylan (Oct 16, 2014)

Francisco said:


> Choopa was quite unreasonable with us


DaveA comes across as an arrogant douchebag on LET -- half his posts are dedicated to bashing other providers -- so that doesn't really surprise me.


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## DaveA (Oct 19, 2014)

@Dylan - Thanks Dylan!

We have 1U colo with 250Watts for $49/m in NJ and 2U is $69, so I'm not sure how you ended up with a quote for $100 for power.


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## DaveA (Oct 19, 2014)

@Francisco - Send me email dave at choopa with your issues and I'll have them all looked at.   We definitely don't want to be the reason for any problems you're having so lets get it cleared up if possible.


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## Francisco (Oct 19, 2014)

DaveA said:


> @Francisco - Send me email dave at choopa with your issues and I'll have them all looked at.   We definitely don't want to be the reason for any problems you're having so lets get it cleared up if possible.


We've talked i'm sure. I've voiced my concerned in my usual cuss heavy way in ticket to you or one of the very high management people.

We had that power strip fail but thankfully your techs did us a solid and upgraded it to a nicer 30A strip, meaning I can get SSD's over there w/o as many headaches.

Francisco


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