Well I usually go to Home Depot, even though there's an ACE a block away... :-) (Just kidding)
If you're keen on Dell, I don't know if they are still making R410s. They're 1U so you can put in 4 Hot Swap drives giving you roughly 7TB per node. They have multiple 1GBe ports so you can bond them if you need to. Assuming you're using 'standard' SATA drives, then you will max out your drive i/o before you max out your networking bandwidth so if you do port bonding, you'll have enough head room. For your ToR switch, I'd recommend the new switch by Blade. http://www.bladenetwork.net/?pi_ad_id=6155346275&gclid=CISh1Y7khKUCFYPV5wod_X3kQA Note: IBM bought them out so prices may vary... They announced a new ToR Switch that had 42 (I think) 1 GBe ports w 4 10GBe uplink ports. Definitely something to consider because if you try to 'trunk' your switch over a 1GBe port you'll see the bottleneck between racks hit you hard. If you've got the budget you could go with 10GBe on the motherboard... or go with SolarFlare's nic cards: http://www.solarflare.com/index.php They have a sweet card that has 2 nic ports (SPIF) each capable of 10GBe bidirectional (so the card handles 40GBe). Definitely a good option if you're doing more things in memory, or you have 8 drive or more per node. Also gives you a future on your hardware. Note: 10GBe isn't 'cheap' and most people don't need it. 10K switch, 1K per nic card is a good budget price... If you want to get away from Dell, you can look at other hardware providers, or you could build your own white boxes for less money, provided you have people who know how to build, install and support your hardware/OS. Most corporations don't do this because its easier to pick up the phone and order a box already built and you get support. You may consider a hybrid approach. Go w Dell/IBM/Oracle/HP (weird saying Oracle and not Sun) for your 'master nodes' [NN,SN,ZKs] where you have raided drives (smaller) and more memory. Go white box for your DN (RS) where if you lose a box, you just bring up a new one in its place and re-balance. HTH -Mike > From: [email protected] > Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2010 09:21:03 -0400 > Subject: Where do you get your hardware? > To: [email protected] > > We are in the process of analyzing our options for the future purchases of > our Hadoop/HBase DN/RS servers. Currently, we purchase Dell PowerEdge > R710's which work well for us. However, we know that there are other > options that may give us more bang for our buck. > > I'm not as interested in knowing the specs of the machines that people are > using. Rather, I'm curious to know where you buy them from or if you are > building them yourselves. > > Any feedback on how you acquire server hardware in your environment would be > greatly appreciated. > > Jason
