RLX Gets Denser

A reader writes: "There's story about RLX Technologies shrinking their "blades" server on Linuxgram." Knowing how much we pay for our "floor space" at the colo, the notion of having multiple blade machines is pretty cool - and shrinking this to a 1U form factor with 6 blade of the Transmeta Crusoe 5800 line of chip is pretty cool.

Comments

Correct link

[Magila]

http://www.linuxgram.com/article.pl?sid=01/11/07/2 251222&section=newsflash

Some RLX caveats

[Wee]

We played with an eval of the RLX deal in April. They were very nice. There were a couple issues with them. Not show-stoppers, but definitely things to think about before deploying them, however, which make the inappropriate in some situations. You'd have to do some work-arounding if you intended to replace "real" servers. Imagine an IBM Thinkpad as a server and you get an idea of what you'd need to do. Things we found:

1. They "slept". I had a server monitoring process which listened on a TCP port. If you didn't connect in a while (seemed like more than a couple hours, but we never timed it), a connection would take like 30 seconds. We figured out that the blade went into a suspend-like mode during periods of inactivity. Since we were looking at these as some sort of low-end round robin-ish thing, that wasn't a desireable feature. Probably could have been adjusted/conf'ed not to happen, but something to think about.
2. And that brings me to the other caveat: they have weasely little IBM microdrives. They're IDE, and slow and completely ill-suited for use in a server. However, you could easily boot off the network (or even the tiny drives; it has slots for two of them, so you could set up failover or something I guess) and then attach a NAS deal to it. But you could probably never get by with just the stock drives in anything but an extremely low-traffic situation.

If you had a shared server web hosting company, could spring for the net storage, and didn't mind a tweak or three, then you could probably host quite a few customers in a quarter rack as opposed to a full rack (the power savings alone would let you pack them in). Throw in another full-powered app/db server and you'd be golden. All in all, the RLX is very interesting in the right applications. Clustering is another possibly appropriate role, now that I think about it (no, I did not say the "B" word).

One more probably uninteresting note: The eval unit we had came with Debian pre-installed. The newer ones have Red Hat (and Win2K, I think). So if you only do Debian, you could probably get the older images and stick 'em on there. Might have to waive support or something though...

-B

RLX is solid gear

[asah]

I work at an ISV building an MPP application, and
we started eval'ing the RLX 324 back in the
summer, and have had 100% success with them:
in a nutshell, each blade is about half the
performance and half the price of our 1U servers.
Overall, the blades are nicerly "balanced" in
terms of performance.

The claims about density, manageability etc. are
all true (divided by 2, ie. comfortable margin).
Beyond sheer density, with bladed servers, you
can deliver scalable apps in a single box, which
removes the big objection that they're "hard to
manage".

We wrote our own cluster admin tools (perl) and run
on redhat 7.1, which they'll pre-install, so it's
been cake-- but this also means that we didn't
try out their management tools.

Having been burned by other vendors on 1U boxes
esp. heat/vibration causing reliability problems,
I've been doubly pleased that the RLX gear hasn't
had any problems-- exactly the sort of stuff
you'd expect from former Compaq execs... but
without all the proprietary crap-- as a test,
we reinstalled redhat from the retail CDs, and
it just worked.