Blade based systems

[Wizard]

> > Why so many servers?
> > Last meeting the IBM guys presented VMware ESX which can reduce the
> > number of physical servers. There is certainly some pros regarding
> > multiple physical servers, but they presented a pretty good argument
> > toward using VMware such that you have multiple virtual servers. I would
> > still go for multiple physical boxes for redundancy.
>
> Redundancy and distribution of resources (CPU power, data lookup, etc).

If those are your primary concerns, then I think I'd look into something
like penguincomputing.com for some nice 1U servers. I've used them for a
compute cluster using LSF and they worked just fine. The only reason I think
that I would consider blades would be space restrictions. An IBM bladecenter
works out to 1/2U and alot more money for less computing power per server.

Grant M.