[buug] Blade servers

[Bob Read]

I agree.
Blade is too much of a departure from "what we know
works", and is too expensive.  IBM is screwing up the
blade stuff as we speak, and doing a marketing blitz,
but the truth is, there's no reason to get one unless
you're building a giant cluster and you have space
constraints....meanwhile, ye old standard config of
motherboard, IDE drives, and slot-based cards keeps
getting faster, cheaper, smaller, and more reliable. 
And supports wake-on-lan NICs, which is the key
feature that you really if you want to "auto-build"
your 10+ servers.

My drug of choice is an n-U server with a 3-ware
card...this gives you hot-swappable RAID on normal IDE
drives, which are CHEAP.  I got mine here (these guys
underbid everyone I talked to and I think I got free
shipping...can't remember):

http://www.siliconmechanics.com

...or..check ebay...great prices on refurbished stuff,
and almost nobody bids on it.  Expect to get a
top-of-the-line 1U for ~$300-600 refurbished/used. 
But if you get 10 servers, you should get them all the
same model to save precious admin time.

Bob R.

--- Will Lowe <harpo at thebackrow.net> wrote:
> > Has anyone formed an attachment to a particular
> class/brand/make/model
> > of blade server?
> 
> The company I work for buys in bulk (sometimes
> orders of 100 or more
> at a time) and we have found that per megahurtz, the
> real blade
> servers -- the sub 1u sized ones -- can't compete
> pricewise with
> normal 1U servers.
> 
> And they're a pain -- they need custom parts,
> sometimes special RAM,
> etc. ... there's no midnight trip to Fry's when the
> disk dies.  For an
> installation of only 10, I'd definitely go with
> something a little
> more standard.
> 
> -- 
> 					thanks,
> 		
> 					Will
> _______________________________________________
> Buug mailing list
> Buug at weak.org
> http://www.weak.org/mailman/listinfo/buug


=====
-----------------------------------------
Bob Read
Exit Code Incorporated
cell (510)-703-1634
unixjavabob at yahoo.com
-----------------------------------------

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