Blade based systems

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 03:07:35PM -0500, Cole Tuininga wrote:
> 
> I have a project that I'm working on that's going to require a fair
> number of servers.  For space considerations, we've been considering
> going with a blade style setup.  I have a couple questions for y'all
> regarding them...  (BTW, they will be intended to run Debian Linux)
> 
> 1) Pros and Cons?  Is there anything I need to know regarding blade
> style servers in general?

There are price/performance curves for rackmount, blade rackmount, and
mainframe systems. Make sure you investigate all three.

If you are distributing small amounts of processing power in many
locations, normal rackmounts are the way to go, possibly with multiple
CPUs.

If you need medium amounts of processing power in an environment where
space is expensive, blades are a good choice.

If you need lots of processing power in an environment where space is
cheap, Beowulf clusters built out of rackmounts are good.

If you need horrendously large I/O capabilities, it's time to start
looking at a small mainframe.

Have you identified the bottlenecks in your application? Is it CPU
bound? Is it parallelizable? Is it a huge numbercrunch, or lots of
transactions? Is memory bandwidth a concern? Will I/O dominate
everything else? Is space expensive? Is redundancy a key feature?

Only a complete analysis of your needs will let you figure out your
preferred architecture.

> 2) Specific experiences?  Anybody have brands they would recommend, or
> recommend *against*?

Remember that everyone except the bottom-of-the-rung will dicker with
you. If the salescritter says "the price is the price", they aren't the
right solution for you.

-dsr-

-- 
Network engineer looking for work in Boston area.
Resume at http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/