[THIN] Re: OT: Blade Servers

  • From: "Schneider, Chad M" <CMSchneider@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "'thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:42:21 -0500

The new HP chassis/blades are the cat's meow!

 

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From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Steve Greenberg
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 12:18 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: Blade Servers

 

Be careful to look at power and cooling requirements up front as the density
of blade servers has a significant impact in these areas.

 

Also, you might want to consider and alternate virtualization method such as
Virtuozzo by swsoft. Because you are targeting SQL and Web you will need
strong I/O performance, this is not the strength of VMWare.

 

Blade management is very important, I don't know if DELL has anything
significant in this area but take a look at what HP offers from their
acquisition of RLX Control Tower, that is pretty much the gold standard- the
ability to see and everything about a blade from a central console....

 

Steve Greenberg

Thin Client Computing

34522 N. Scottsdale Rd D8453

Scottsdale, AZ 85262

(602) 432-8649

www.thinclient.net

steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

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From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Evan Mann
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 9:18 AM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] OT: Blade Servers

 

It looks like I'm going to be moving into the land of Blade servers.  We're
a Dell shop, so Dell 1955's are what is being looked at right now. I want to
put together a host list of key items to make sure these things
have/support.  Memory backed RAID cache and power issues are the only thing
I have on the list now, since that was the main issues I've seen come across
the list.  Obviously, management of the blade chassis is important.

 

If it's useful, here is what we are planning to do with the Blades:

There is no intention of moving our Citrix farm to blades, but we are
deploying a new business level app using VMWare ESX3.  This new app will
utilize web servers and SQL servers.  The web farms will be in ESX and will
utilize an application load balancer, the SQL servers (starting with 1) will
likely not be in ESX, but that is undecided.

 

We will have a fiber connected SAN as well, but the plan isn't to boot off
the SAN (right now at least).  It is unknown if we will connect the entire
blade chassis to the SAN, or servers individually. It depends on the cost of
the fiber switches.


We are doing a lot of server consolidation as well to 2 existing 2850 (dual
3.4ghz Xeon's) running ESX3.  As we need more capacity, we will use
additional Blades for ESX 3 and consolidation.

 

The 10 blade chassis specs out to about 6k.  Each 3ghz Dual Core (woodcrest)
blade with 16 gigs of RAM, 2x75gig SAS drives and dual Broadcom TOE
GigE/dual QLogic Fiber HBA's will run us about $6600 (including
warranty/support)

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