[THIN] Re: Hardware - Blades, SAN?

  • From: "Taylor, George" <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:36:57 -0600

We're implementing this right now.  You give up one of the on-board
drives to make space for the HBA.  What I've decided to do is boot from
the SAN and use the little on-board IDE drive for nothing but the swap
and temp files.  You can get SCSI drives on the blades, but its an
attached cage that takes up a second slot.  My testing using the HS20s,
dual Xeons, 4gig ram, booting from the FastT has shown them to be very
robust machines.  Currently we only have 1 Optical pass-thru and 1
ethernet switch installed, but you can double up on both for redundancy
if need be.  The ethernet switch gives you 4 ports that can be trunked
and plays very well with our Cisco 6500 gear, the throughput is good and
from what our networking guys say we are hardly touching the 4gig limit.
The optical pass-thru gives you a fiber channel from each and every
blade, wire management with that much fiber coming from such a little
space is a chore, but does work.


  _____  

        From: SMREKAR, JACK [mailto:SMREKAR@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
        Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 4:59 AM
        To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
        Subject: [THIN] Re: Hardware - Blades, SAN?
        
        

        While we do not have any blades I have been also thinking about
using them for some things.  Depending upon the company you use for your
blades I would question if you need to use a SAN for the storage of your
apps.  They are coming with upwards of 80 gig drives and I think some of
them are now just starting to come with SCSI drives so you can mirror
the drives.  I would look at purchasing them as they are and not to
worry about attaching them to a SAN.  Besides I am not sure that you
could get a HBA inside one of them to attach to the SAN.

         

        Jack Smrekar

        Appleton Area School District

         

        
  _____  


        From: Chris Grecsek [mailto:grecsek@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
        Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 4:31 AM
        To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
        Subject: [THIN] Hardware - Blades, SAN?

         

        We're trying to determine which way to go with our backend
hardware for our Citrix farm...I've been hearing a lot about these blade
servers and was wondering if we should setup our farm on a slew of
blades and tie it into a SAN? Seems like the optimal configuration for a
ton of users running basic apps like Office, IE, Acrobat, etc. 

         

        Was wondering if anyone had any feedback regarding a setup like
this - have you done it, advisable, not really, pro/cons, etc.

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