[THIN] RE: [THIN] Re: OT: Blade Servers

  • From: Evan Mann <emann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 09:33:09 -0400

Can you (or anyone) elaborate on what makes them the new cat's meow,
aside from management software aspect?  I'm just looking at hardware
aspects right now.  

________________________________

From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Schneider, Chad M
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 2:42 PM
To: 'thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: Blade Servers



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

 

________________________________

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

 

________________________________

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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