Blade Server Price Quotes

[Armitage]

Anybody know of a site to get online customizable price quotes for a blade server system? All the sites I've looked at want you to call for quotes, but I'm just not interested in engaging with a sales person just yet.

Any good references on blade systems in general?

 

[d3n]

Well, for the old 1855 blade servers from Dell you could price them out on the large business website. Not sure about the new 1955s. You generally have to get hooked up with a Dell premier login to reflect any discounts. Even then, the Sales Rep can often beat that.

Right now HP just released the C class blade server setup with the 460c blades. Those things are powerhouses. I think if you buy a small number of blades with HP you might get by with licensing a slice of blade chassis and upgrade that as you put in more servers.

I'm curious about the blade requirement. It might be worth looking into the Dell 1950 and 2950 servers. I am really fond of a rackmount 2900 because of the expandability. You can use the same system image for all 9th gen Dell servers. Very handy for virtualization.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: d3n
Well, for the old 1855 blade servers from Dell you could price them out on the large business website. Not sure about the new 1955s. You generally have to get hooked up with a Dell premier login to reflect any discounts. Even then, the Sales Rep can often beat that.

Right now HP just released the C class blade server setup with the 460c blades. Those things are powerhouses. I think if you buy a small number of blades with HP you might get by with licensing a slice of blade chassis and upgrade that as you put in more servers.

I'm curious about the blade requirement. It might be worth looking into the Dell 1950 and 2950 servers. I am really fond of a rackmount 2900 because of the expandability. You can use the same system image for all 9th gen Dell servers. Very handy for virtualization.

Ok, I understand very little of that. Where can I look for a basic into to blade technology and a summary of the state of the art?

I work on a small beowulf computational cluster (16 nodes), and have an app that we're looking to deploy to a remote site ... but they don't want the hassle of maintaining a cluster and can't affort the space either. So a blade unit would definitely cut down on the space, and it should help with some aspects of the maintenance as well ... I think. But again, I don't know to much about them.

 

[d3n]

Not to dumb it down but

Blade Server

You mentioned clustering. That gets very expensive with blade servers as its usually needed to have a shared drive array connected via fiberchannel. I am not a fan of the costs associated with this.

With your current clusters how are they interconnected?

It looks like you are looking for raw CPU power. Otherwise I would probablly recommend a Dell2900 tower with a direct attached array of HDs and a virtual machine like VMWare Server. Since you look like you need CPU power in an easy to manage setup blades would be the way to go. I would look at the HP c7000 blade enclosure and the 460 blade servers.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: d3n
Not to dumb it down but

Blade Server

You mentioned clustering. That gets very expensive with blade servers as its usually needed to have a shared drive array connected via fiberchannel. I am not a fan of the costs associated with this.

Well, it needs to have some shared space (via NFS currently). But it's not much space (a few 10s to 100s of MB) and not very performance critical. It does need a good database server, which I expect will be it's own 2 or 3 U box connected via ethernet.

With your current clusters how are they interconnected?

gigabit ethernet - the app in question is very coarsely divided. There is no node-to-node message passing, and aside from a largish push of data (few hundred MB) from the master to the nodes at the beginning, the rest of the comm load is pretty light as well.

It looks like you are looking for raw CPU power.

Absolutely

Otherwise I would probablly recommend a Dell2900 tower with a direct attached array of HDs and a virtual machine like VMWare Server. Since you look like you need CPU power in an easy to manage setup blades would be the way to go. I would look at the HP c7000 blade enclosure and the 460 blade servers.

Thanks - I'll take a look at that.

 

[d3n]

Just to throw my thoughts in on the database server. I would look closely at the 2950 or a 2900 in a rack configuration. HP equivalent would be a DL360 G5 or DL380 G5. Something you can cram a lot of HDs into without going to an external enclosure. I would not get anything but SAS drives now. I think SCSI is on the way out fast.

I would have the OS on a RAID 1 setup and the DB on raid 10. The performance hit with the parity checks of RAID 5 kill a DB compared to RAID10. I probably would add another SAS controller just to handle the logs. Don?t worry about the 15k RPM SAS drives since very seldom (as far as SQL goes) would the lower latency be needed. The extra controller card would make a difference. If its light loads you might get by fine with a single CPU on this until you decide to upgrade.


Of course, these are pretty big generalizations your app could be different. Good luck! .