Over the next year ETC Maryland going to be consolidating the web farm. While the older Intel machines might be a good value, the continuing security issues that are being found is beginning to take it’s toll. The performance decrease from the various security mitigations has seen disk load on both web1 and web3 go up by more than 25%. While this has not begun to severely affect site performance it is eating into the performance reserves of both machines. Upgrading the storage is not going to be a sustainable way to keep the machines from getting overloaded. If the drives are upgraded then that will put even greater stress on the processors leading to a quicker overall decline of performance. Chasing bottlenecks in older generation gear is not sustainable. ETC Maryland has simply begun to outgrow it’s founding hardware. Over the next 6-12 months, ETC Maryland will be deploying new servers based on the AMD EPYC Processors( or a newer gen Xeon) that will eliminate this issue. This will allow consolidation of the farm to fewer servers and will also reduce ongoing costs This will allow ETC Maryland to continue with the highly competitive feature set and value we have offered for years. We will post more information as it becomes available.
