blade servers?

blade servers?

[Larry McVoy]

I figured that people here would know.  If you were looking for blade
servers and you were more interested in cost and heat generation than the
most performance, what would you buy?  We're looking for 20 x86 cpus.
They have to beat ASUS terminators (nice little boxes, if you haven't
checked them out you should, about $100 + cpu + mem + disk and they are
quiet and run on ~100watt power supplies so they don't generate a lot
of heat).

So far, the stuff at www.rackmount.com looks pretty good but they are
(like everyone else so far as I can tell) focussed on performance.
For all of the Unix like platforms, we'd be happy with 2Ghz Athlons (don't
need opterons) with 256MB.  It's true that for the windows platforms we
like 2GB because we use 1GB as a ram disk to get reasonable performance
out of @#!! Windows.

Thanks in advance,

--lm

Re: blade servers?

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I figured that people here would know.  If you were looking for blade
> servers and you were more interested in cost and heat generation than the
> most performance, what would you buy?  We're looking for 20 x86 cpus.
> They have to beat ASUS terminators (nice little boxes, if you haven't
> checked them out you should, about $100 + cpu + mem + disk and they are
> quiet and run on ~100watt power supplies so they don't generate a lot
> of heat).

You're  not going to find blade hardware that's cost competitive with 
barebones pc chasis on a per unit basis...

That said you over-simplifying the issue a bit. Terminator minitowers 
are 11" high so if you set them on a shelf in a rack you get 2 in 7u or 
maybe 4, if you're willing to have a cable management nightmare and a 
heat problem in the middle.

People are willing to pay a lot relatively speaking for space efficiency, 
rack hardware, sane cable cable management, and easly repalacable parts.

In general, managing costs has a lot to do with not buying what you don't 
need which in this case sounds like lots of cpu power, but in the case of 
cluster users includes cdrom drives, floppies, occasionaly harddisks etc.

> So far, the stuff at www.rackmount.com looks pretty good but they are
> (like everyone else so far as I can tell) focussed on performance.
> For all of the Unix like platforms, we'd be happy with 2Ghz Athlons (don't
> need opterons) with 256MB.  It's true that for the windows platforms we
> like 2GB because we use 1GB as a ram disk to get reasonable performance
> out of @#!! Windows.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> --lm
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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu
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Re: blade servers?

[linux-os (Dick Johnson)]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I figured that people here would know.  If you were looking for blade
> servers and you were more interested in cost and heat generation than the
> most performance, what would you buy?  We're looking for 20 x86 cpus.
> They have to beat ASUS terminators (nice little boxes, if you haven't
> checked them out you should, about $100 + cpu + mem + disk and they are
> quiet and run on ~100watt power supplies so they don't generate a lot
> of heat).
>
> So far, the stuff at www.rackmount.com looks pretty good but they are
> (like everyone else so far as I can tell) focussed on performance.
> For all of the Unix like platforms, we'd be happy with 2Ghz Athlons (don't
> need opterons) with 256MB.  It's true that for the windows platforms we
> like 2GB because we use 1GB as a ram disk to get reasonable performance
> out of @#!! Windows.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> --lm

Check out http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c292/blage-server.php.
We evaluated one (so far). Prices are not too bad, plus you
can get 5 different blades. The full chassis, with 14 blades,
needs good ventilation -- lots of power -- lots of heat!


Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.15.4 on an i686 machine (5589.42 BogoMips).
Warning : 98.36% of all statistics are fiction, book release in April.
_
\x1a\x04

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Thank you.

Re: blade servers?

[David R]

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Larry McVoy wrote:

> For all of the Unix like platforms, we'd be happy with 2Ghz Athlons (don't
> need opterons) with 256MB.  It's true that for the windows platforms we

No specific recommendations, but one thing to keep in mind is that later
process/stepping Athlon 64/Opterons are far more power efficient (especially
when using powernow) than older 32 bit Athlons.

I'm not sure why Xeon based space heaters^H^H blades have been recommended in
previous posts when low power is an issue?!?

Cheers
David


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Re: blade servers?

[Wes Felter]

Larry McVoy wrote:
> I figured that people here would know.  If you were looking for blade
> servers and you were more interested in cost and heat generation than the
> most performance, what would you buy?

Consider systems based on the "Sossaman" Xeon LV processor; it has good 
integer performance and low power.

For example, at IBM we just released a new model of the BladeCenter HS20 
(model 7981); I've seen one of these servers using only 100W when 
running. Real servers are never going to be as cheap as the cheapest 
whiteboxes, but they do run cool.

Wes Felter - wesley@felter.org