Blade Servers

[Fraser Campbell]

On Monday 14 February 2005 16:55, teddy mills wrote:

> I would go with IBM, but they sold all their PC sales to Lenova.
> Im not keen on buying IBM right now.

Only PC division, and it's not certain that US gov will even let them sell 
that ... "national security".


> Then there is Dell, but the're not innovators, just good copiers.
> Then there is the HP. I know HP makes enterprise hardware, but anyone
> have any good/bad
> experience with Blade Servers?

My company uses a lot of blade servers but I haven't yet been involved with 
them yet, still I would assume there aren't many reliability issues since we 
continue to deploy them.  I'm pretty sure they're IBM HS20 (or is that JS20), 
they run SLES8 at the moment.

For what purpose do you need so many machines, raw number crunching power or 
something else?

If it's not for number crunching capabilities then a number of reasonably 
powerful servers combined with virtualization might do the trick?  There is 
open source Xen for Linux virtualization, or there's hardware level 
virtualization as in an IBM OpenPower 720 (or similar), I suspect there are 
altenative virtualization technologies as well (commercial and OSS).  
Webhosting companies often use virtualization for providing multiple "root" 
servers.

> What about reliable small form factor PCs? Like shuttle PCs, but even
> smaller?

I'd be surprised if small and reliable exists except in blade format. Small 
form factor PCs have been crap IME.

One possibility might be the multiple servers in a 1U though, I recall seeing 
4 narrow PCs jammed into a single 1U chassis, that might not get you quite to 
blade density but closer at least ... if these machines are still available.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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