Blade Servers

Question

Blade Servers

tcartwright

SSCertifiable

Points: 5573
More actions
March 14, 2003 at 12:43 am

#58943

My company is looking at implementing a hosted solution for a new product we are developing, and I am currently in the process of evaluating blade servers vs. pizza box servers. So far the blades have the 1U pizza boxes beat, yet I am worried about heat issues.
I am evaluating :
RLX http://www.rlx.com/products/chassis/300ex.php
Compaq http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/platforms/index-bl.html
Dell http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/esg_pedge_rackmain_servers_1_pedge_1655mc.htm
So far I am leaning towards using RLX, then Compaq as a second choice. I have heard the Dell's have heat issues(their own CIO said so). Has anyone out there implemented a blade solution? Thoughts? Suggestions?
This is a quote from the below URL :
quote:
The Transmeta-based blade system at Los Alamos has yet to fail since the laboratory unveiled it last year, Feng said. The 240 processors sit in a rack that would fit in a large closet, which is housed in a hot, dusty warehouse.
By contrast, an 18-processor Intel-based system at Los Alamos fails after 10 minutes in the same environment, by giving incorrect results when running benchmark tests, Feng said. When the Intel-based system is placed in a costly, specially-cooled datacenter, it performs on a par with the Transmeta-based system, he added."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/03/07/HNbladesstorygo_1.html
Tim C.
//Will write code for food

Tim C //Will code for food

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply

K. Brian Kelley SSC Guru Points: 114642 More actions · Answer 1

We took a look at Compaq's as we are a Compaq shop. The idea that Altiris has to be leveraged heavily in order to use their blade solutions isn't a big deal for us... as we already are using Altiris for our workstations.

The big catch with any blade server setup is the robustness of the individual blades. We eval'ed the 10e which are single processor. At first, we thought about using these for DCs in our Active Directory domain. They would have worked okay, we couldn't justify the cost differential.

Once you get outside of the single processor blades, your advantage of less space is quickly shrunk. For instance, the 2 processor blade servers Compaq is coming out with is only 2U smaller than an equivalent # of DL360G2s. But the DL360G2s are cheaper and provide for the mirrored drives that can be swapped on the fly, the array controller that can be swapped for a read/write one (needed for Citrix), etc. The G3s can have a redundant power supply (if you've ever lost a fan, you know how much of a pain this really is).

Another option is some robust hardware and VMWare GSX Server... we're seriously looking at VMWare for some of our server consolidations.

K. Brian Kelley

http://www.truthsolutions.com/

Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring

http://www.netimpress.com/shop/product.asp?ProductID=NI-SQL1

K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley

tcartwright SSCertifiable Points: 5573 More actions · Answer 2

We were planning on using the blades for web servers, and com+ application

servers, with sql server on the back end.

Load balancing :

*1st tier - Web servers (A HW load balancer, or maybe SW, not decided yet)

*2nd tier - Com Plus servers using CLB(Com Plus Load Balancing) from MSFT's

App Center, this I have never load tested. Tested in a small 2 server test lab before.

*3rd tier - A SQL Cluster

*Data - SAN - RAID Fibre box

Whew! Does that sound complicated enough? The idea is to get a flat line of

processing power on each tier so that even if the blades are on the low end as

far as CPU, we can distribute the load so it does not matter. We get too much

load in one area, we add another blade. At least that is the idea. I have never

seen this level of clustering done (across all 3-tiers of an n-tier system).

DL360's are nice boxes btw, We had a ton of them at Splitrock where I was at

before. WE had even beta tested their first one several years back. I am worried

about the validity of my design here, and would appreciate any thoughts /

suggestions.

Tim C.

//Will write code for food

Tim C //Will code for food

K. Brian Kelley SSC Guru Points: 114642 More actions · Answer 3

Realize for redundancy sake you're going to have to have an app server farm to point to your COM+ server farm, unless I'm mistaken. It's been a LONG time since I've looked hard at app center.