Selectel Dedicated Servers

The main articles are:

• Servers (Global Market)
• Servers (Russian market)

2024

Arenadata DB Database Launch

Selectel and Arenadata have announced a technology partnership. The company was informed about this on October 10, 2024.

Thanks to cooperation, companies will be able to offer the market a solution in the field of big data management - the Arenadata DB (ADB) analytical database of the Enterprise level on dedicated Selectel servers. Read more here.

Launch Dedicated Server Rental Service with Customer Site Location

Selectel on June 19, 2024 announced the launch of a dedicated server rental service with location on the customer's site. The proposal is relevant for large companies with special legislative and corporate requirements for the layout of the IT infrastructure.

As part of the service, Selectel rents dedicated servers of any configuration, as well as network equipment, with subsequent installation in the customer's data center or other third-party data center. Servers are assembled by Selectel specialists from individual components, which ensures independence from one or more vendors and a high degree of customization for client tasks. The service includes the transportation, installation and configuration of equipment, as well as the replacement of faulty components in the event of a server failure. The service is available in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Take-out server equipment rental is relevant for customers who have increased requirements for the IT infrastructure layout due to corporate or legislative measures: in particular, banks, industrial, scientific, medical organizations and others. The service eliminates the capital cost of server equipment and ensures rapid scalability of the IT infrastructure.

The launch of the take-away server rental service is dictated by the current challenges faced by the business - this is the rise in price of equipment and the lengthening delivery times, - said Konstantin Ansimov, Product Director of Selectel. - Selectel's computing consumption model may be a good opportunity for companies that prefer to maintain full control over their IT infrastructure while still wanting to maintain a high rate of scale-up and launch of new projects without large capital expenditures.

Neoflex Dognauts availability on dedicated Selectel servers

Selectel and Neoflex announced a technology partnership on April 16, 2024. Selectel customers can now automate the management of DS/ML models using the Neoflex Dognauts MLOps platform on dedicated servers or in the provider's cloud. Read more here.

2023

Self-selection instead of Dell and HP. How Selectel refused to buy ready-made servers

Selectel gradually came to the conclusion that all server equipment, on the basis of which it provides data center services to its customers, collects itself. The company told about this on September 21, 2023.

The IT infrastructure provider offers customers ready-made dedicated servers of its assembly, and assembles and tests servers at the request of customers for whom there are special configurators on the company's website. Typically, clients assemble their own server if, for example, they need a platform with very high performance or with a non-standard number of disk drives.

Selectel assembles servers from multi-vendor server platforms and separately purchased components, including Intel and AMD processors, GPU accelerators, motherboards, memory, power supplies, etc. The company has a special warehouse to store them. Selectel has its own assembly in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Leningrad Region.

In one of the Selectel data centers on the street. Flower in St. Petersburg "(photo: TAdviser)"

"We overlap all customer demand," Ilya Mikhailov, technology director at Selectel data centers, said in a conversation with TAdviser. The company says that this is a rather atypical story: single players in the commercial data center market have deployed their own assembly on a significant scale, especially until 2022. Previously, most players purchased servers assembled, while mostly they were A-class vendors, including Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. Now it has become more difficult to buy them.

Although Selectel no longer acquires ready-made vendor servers, you can find such solutions in the server rooms in its data centers, including top-end server models from Western manufacturers. This is the equipment that the customers themselves placed in the data center, the company explains.

Selectel Product Director Konstantin Ansimov, in a conversation with TAdviser, noted that long before the events of 2022, their company built its business in such a way as not to be tied to individual vendors and provide different server options in each direction. To do this, cooperation was established with a wide range of Russian suppliers - distributors, including large ones, who took on the headache associated with the logistics of components.

After the demarche of many large foreign vendors from Russia in 2022, the chosen approach turned out to be even more relevant than before.

Konstantin Ansimov told TAdviser that among Selectel's customers there are companies that previously purchased equipment from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. Now they are faced with problems in its acquisition, and the way out for them is to rent their own assembly equipment from the provider, because they themselves do not want to rebuild the procurement process, but want a ready-made service. There are more requests from customers who want to replace class "A" products in this way, according to Selectel.

Customers bought class "A" equipment, including due to vendor technical support with very high efficiency, says Konstantin Ansimov. Selectel provides support for its own assembly equipment. And if there is technical support at the same level and the performance is the same, then there is no difference from which vendor the equipment is.

At the same time, as Selectel technical director Kirill Malevanov said at a conference on September 21, their company has grown from three people to ten in 2022-2023. The procurement department has grown from three people to ten with about the same volume of equipment. These are employees who deal with papers and conduct administrative activities with suppliers. The expansion was required due to the fact that now products have to be purchased in smaller batches: if earlier, for example, 100 Nvidia A100 video cards were purchased, now it is necessary to make 10 small batches from 9 to 11 pieces. "Not only do they go from different countries, you also have to pay to different places," says Kirill Malevanov.

Examples of components that are offered to customers in server configurations "(photo: TAdviser)"

The platforms offered to customers use not only equipment from well-known Western suppliers, but also, among other things, Chinese, and not the first tier from vendors. The range of vendors from China with whom Selectel works and tests their products has become larger, notes Konstantin Anisimov. The company purchases and tests, among other things, such equipment that it does not use to know whether it is suitable or not.

In 2023, Selectel, in addition to configurations on Intel and AMD processors, offered its customers servers on ARM processors - Ampere Altra. While servers on ARM are used by a small number of clients: "this trend is just emerging," says Konstantin Ansimov. This processor architecture cannot yet be called suitable for a wide range of tasks, but for some specific tasks it fits better than x86. And in the world there is a trend towards an increase in the share of servers based on ARM processors.

They experimented, among other things, with the Elbrus processor - Elbrus-8SV, in particular. But at that time, in 2022, Selectel came to the conclusion that in order to transfer servers to Elbrus to the same convenience for the end user as on standard processors, it would be necessary to invest a lot of effort and time: to break your head over automation of processes, recompile the necessary programs, think about how to bypass all existing restrictions. The company considered that without a catastrophic need, these investments would not be justified by^[1].

Preparing to launch a service to deploy Kubernetes clusters based on dedicated servers

Selectel is preparing to launch a managed service for deploying Kubernetes clusters based on dedicated servers (Managed Kubernetes on Bare Metal). Konstantin Ansimov, Product Director of the company, spoke about the implementation of the decision on September 21, 2023.

Using Managed Kubernetes on dedicated servers will allow customers to improve the performance of their microservice applications. This is possible due to the lack of a hypervisor - software that virtualizes the resources of physical servers. Some databases and applications with constant load can be demanding on computing resources, in particular local disks and networks, so the ability to work on bare hardware will improve their performance. At the same time, Selectel clients, as before, can use Managed Kubernetes in the cloud for applications with uneven load that require automatic scaling.

Clients will be able to use dedicated servers to deploy the Kubernetes worker node, while the master nodes will remain in the cloud. The combination of dedicated and cloud servers will simultaneously provide high service performance and reduce IT infrastructure costs by up to 40%. The solution guarantees a high level of data protection, since the client receives server capacity allocated and reserved only for his project. To implement especially high-load computing (for example, ML projects), it is possible to rent Kubernetes clusters based on dedicated servers with GPUs.

{{quote "Selectel's leadership in the Bare Metal Cloud segment and deep expertise in the development of platform services make it possible to present a managed solution special for the Russian market," said Konstantin Ansimov, Selectel Product Director. - Every year, the approach to the implementation of microservice architecture is becoming more and more popular among Russian companies and developers, so we expect that the new solution will also be in high demand. From October 2023, the service will operate in beta testing mode: within this period, companies will be able to use it for free to implement their projects. }}

Launch of server rental service on ARM architecture

On January 17, 2023, Selectel announced the launch of a server rental service on ARM architecture.

Processors on ARM architecture have been used in mobile devices for many years, and as of January 2023, they are increasingly used in server configurations for placement in data centers. Servers with ARM chips are more energy efficient and compact compared to configurations with traditional x86 architecture, which is important for data center operators.

Servers based on the ARM architecture show high performance in tasks such as modeling and development of engineering systems, web services and instant messengers, data storage and processing using machine learning.

The service offers a complete server configuration from Gigabyte with the following technical characteristics:

• Ampere Altra Max ARM processor M128-30 3 GHz for 128 cores
• 256 GB DDR4 memory
• Drive 2 × 1920 GB SSD NVMe.

We began to expand the line of servers with configurations with ARM processors back in 2020, "said Igor Lepikhin, head of hardware at Selectel. - Then we offered the market to test the ARM servers of Huawei Kunpeng 920, however, due to coronavirus restrictions and disruption of supply chains, it was necessary to suspend the scaling of the service.

2022: Amsterdam site launch

On April 5, 2022, Selectel announced the expansion of the geography of services - now the Amsterdam region is available to the company's customers. On the basis of this European site, you can order dedicated servers and use the services of the Selectel cloud platform. Read more here.

2021

Providing Single Board PC Configurations

May 12, 2021, Selectel provider cloudy infrastructure and services, data centers announced the expansion of the line of allocated, servers available for rent. The company offered for ordering a configuration based on single-board PCs: Mac mini with an M1 chip, as well as a budget version of accommodation based on 4B. Raspberry Pi

Selectel customers will have access to the following technology features:

• By renting a server from macOS to M1, DevOps engineers and developers will be able to improve CI/CD processes, create and debug software for macOS and iOS, completely delegating questions on infrastructure organization and network availability to the cloud provider.
• Renting a server with Raspberry Pi 4B is a budget version of the dedicated server from Selectel. The configuration is suitable for companies and individuals for whom it is important to host on a dedicated server, but within a certain budget. At the same time, they will be able to take advantage of all the advantages of dedicated Selectel servers, including 24/7 technical support services and the possibility of monthly rental.

We are pleased to offer server rental services based on single-board PCs - two configurations for different business tasks. Selectel strives to constantly complement the product line with technological solutions, while focusing on the needs of various categories of customers, "said Konstantin Ansimov, Director of Dedicated Server and Equipment Development, Selectel.

{{quote "Selectel customers are both large companies and small businesses, so it is also important for us to offer solutions in various price segments. For example, renting a server based on the Raspberry Pi 4B is a special configuration for the Russian market in terms of a combination of the technological advantages of the platform and its cost, "added Konstantin Ansimov. }}

Availability of Dedicated 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Servers

On April 15, 2021, the company, and Selectel provider cloudy infrastructures services, data centers announced the availability for ordering allocated on the servers basis of the 3rd Intel Xeon Scalable generation - server processors with support (AI), artificial intelligence which the corporation Intel announced on April 6, 2021.

As noted in the company, the scalable 3rd generation Intel Xeon processor family provides a significant performance increase - an average of 46% compared to the previous generation. When ordering a dedicated server of arbitrary configuration, Selectel clients can select Intel Xeon Silver 4314, Intel Xeon Gold 6336Y, Intel Xeon Gold 6354 processors. A number of new and enhanced capabilities will allow customers to build an IT infrastructure of any complexity and achieve the required performance indicators. Support for the Intel Software Guard Extension (Intel SGX) to improve data and application code protection will enable projects that require confidential communication.

"As part of the Selectel and Intel collaboration program, we tested 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors in advance in our Selectel Lab. Their performance is definitely higher than that of the previous generation, they have increased memory bandwidth, thanks to PCIe support Gen4 the speed of data exchange with external devices has been doubled, "said Konstantin Ansimov, Director of Dedicated Server and Equipment Development, Selectel.

Collecting the server and placing it in the Tier III data center is possible within 1 to 5 business days after receipt of the application.

2019: Implementation of an updated dedicated server management system

December 10, 2019 provider IT infrastructures Selectel reported that he developed and implemented an updated system for managing allocated. servers The time from ordering to accessing the server was reduced to 120 seconds. All operations are carried out in automatic mode.

Ready-to-order servers are available online in the updated dashboard. Their preparation and transfer to customers takes place without the involvement of technical specialists. It takes 120 seconds to five minutes to access a server without an operating system. The installation of the base software selected by the customer is also automatic.

The service billing system has been modernized. Thanks to this, dynamic tariff plans have become available, and servers of ready-made configurations can be rented for rent without an installation payment.

In addition, the management system implements API support, which greatly simplifies work with servers.

For the past year and a half, we have devoted the automation of the service to completely exclude engineers from the service delivery process. The updated management system has turned iron servers into bare metal cloud. Now dedicated servers are suitable, for example, for rapidly increasing capacity during peak loads and for launching projects in a short time frame for a short period of time. Even as we work on major technical changes, we don't forget the nice little things. This also appeared in this release - the names of famous scientists are assigned to new servers, - said Konstantin Ansimov, director of development of the "Dedicated Servers" Selectel service.

Optimized and ordering servers of arbitrary configurations. The updated version of the online configurator works faster and better analyzes the compatibility of components. With its help, the customer can design a server with an arbitrary number of processors, memory modules, hard drives, network and additional devices. Such a machine will optimally solve specific problems. It takes an average of 1-2 business days to start an arbitrary configuration server.

2016: Dedicated GPU server

On July 20, 2016, Selectel announced the launch of a dedicated server rental service with graphics cards. These servers are best suited for demanding performance and memory bandwidth tasks.

Dedicated GPU server is a service for leasing dedicated servers with graphics cards as computing processors. The company is positioning a solution for use in neural networks and Big Data processing.

Features of the graphics card processor architecture (GPU) have more processing power. They repeatedly speed up computing, which is critical for processing neural network algorithms, modeling and calculating physical processes, designing, processing real-time media content, financial analytics, etc. Projects in these areas require a special infrastructure: standard servers or public clouds do not fully meet their needs.

The demand for high-performance computing is growing, but not every company can afford the appropriate infrastructure. GPU servers are very expensive, consume more power, and are more demanding on operating conditions. The rental model makes such equipment massively accessible. In this case, there is no need for significant capital expenditures at the start and there is the possibility of rapid scaling. Alexander Vechersky, Director of Public Relations at Selectel