Slashdot Mirror
Linux Clustering Hardware?
Kanagawa asks: "The last few years have seen a slew of new Linux clustering and blade-server hardware solutions; they're being offered by the likes of HP, IBM, and smaller companies like Penguin Computing. We've been using the HP gear for awhile with mixed results and have decided to re-evaluate other solutions. We can't help but notice that the Google gear in our co-lo appears to be off-the-shelf motherboards screwed to aluminum shelves. So, it's making us curious. What have Slashdot's famed readers found to be reliable and cost effective for clustering? Do you prefer blade server forms, white-box rack mount units, or high-end multi-CPU servers? And, most importantly, what do you look for when making a choice?"
For the size and performance, they are hard to beat. A dual opteron setup in a 1U rack case is a very powerful setup in and of itself. The bonus of using off the shelf components with no need for proprietary hardware or software also make them very affordable. The added bonus is that you can simply get the parts from regular retailers for replacement.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
To those who say Apple isn't targeting the enterprise, look no further.
Let me know when they stop trying to force their iPod updater (you know, the one that breaks Real's compatability DRM software) onto my servers. No matter how many times you put that update in the "Never update this" category, it shows back up the next time you run Software Update. Until they stop trying to play childish games on my production servers, I'll not consider them ready for the enterprise.
Currently 65 (1 master, 64 nodes) of AMD Mobos on Ikea shelves. Cheap, easy to swap out, good air flow around the hardware. The shelves are wood, so everything just sits on them. It would be nice to find power supplies with extra connections to power more than one system.
We wanted to set up a small 4-8 node cluster mostly for testing and as a compute resource. For various political reasons we were looking at an IBM solution. At my uirging we went for dual Opterons in the 1U format. And the price seemed right. Here's where it gets wierd *after* the OBM sales people step in. Going thourgh it peice by piece I thought I could put a decent system together - with our substantial IBM discount -- for $14k. By the time we got the quote with all of the crap they thought we needed it was 34k! Just to give the flavor, the rack and assorted pieces was 4k. But thats not the funny part. We were like, "well for this much money, we assume you are putting it together for us." "Um no...didn't you see the services quote that went along with this?" We hadn't -- with the services/support quote came in at $60k! So at this point we asked, can't we just buy the individual pieces we need and put it together ourselves. "Well, yes, but then it won't be an IBM e1350 cluster 'solution'..." "Yea, well, we don't really care what its called, it'll be just as fast and 75% cheaper..." At that time they were getting rid of their 325 servers for way cheap and we actually put that system together for as cheap as a whitebox and probably as cheap as if we'd tried to put it together ourselves. The moral I guess is that if you have to deal with the big vendors, have a very sharp pencil handy!