On 11/17/2010 12:06 PM, Hugh Brown wrote: > My understanding is that it's definitely CPU bound. > Ok, that makes things a bit easier. >> You might be setting your bar a bit low. You could potentially get a >> full rack of 1U servers for less than that (40 U * 8 cores * 2 CPUs). > Agreed; I was kind of lazy in my summary, which was based on blades. > (Half a rack of blades will just about max out our power budget per rack.) > I'd steer away from blades unless you need highly reliable. You pay a pretty steep premium for them and you don't get it back in power savings, contrary to what the vendors would like you believe. Most blade systems end up using a little bit more power because of the extra redundancy. Also, they tend to generate much more heat, so be sure your room cooling is up to it. (more in the sense that it's a lot hotter because of lower air volume flow. This can be good or bad depending upon your cooling plant design)
>> I'd recommend looking at the Supermicro Twin Squared if you want to >> stick in half rack configuration. You'll get better power efficiency and >> screwless maintenance/replacement. Dell has a similar product for a >> similar price, but not as easily maintainable. > Thanks for the suggestion. I've had a brief look at the C6500 from > Dell and noticed the web-only interface for BIOS/ILOM/what have > you...if there was a CLI, the reseller didn't notice it. Was that > what you were referring to, or were there other things that make you > say it's not as maintainable? > You can manage both of the IP/KVM of the supermicro or the Dell using non-web tools if you prefer (freeipmi/ipmitool/ssh) as long as you know what you're trying to do. The supermicro has a really nice feature where you can mount virtual media to the BIOS from a SMB share. That's handy at times. What I was referring to is that the Dell design, as I recall it, does not allow hot swap of motherboards. You have to power the entire 4 units off to service it. On the supermicro, you can swap all boards individually without touching/affecting the other 3. >> The twin squared has 4 servers in 2 U and each is on an independent >> sled. I have a favorite supermicro dealer who will rack the whole >> thing, cable it to my specifications, do an acceptance test, and >> ship it as one unit for a relatively low install fee. They even >> label the machines and cables and color code according to our >> specs. Finally, they give us a spreadsheet with all of the IPs, mac >> addresses, etc. as part of the deliverable. > I hadn't thought about getting the vendor to do the test. Do you do > that because it's convenient, or just because you trust the vendor > that much? > We don't do it exclusive of our own testing, but it keeps the vendor from delivering an obviously out-of-spec node in the group. That saves time in making the cluster operational as it prevents an RMA at the beginning. We do have a good relationship with our cluster integrator though. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
