Blade System

We are looking at possibly completely swapping out our datacenter equipment for various reasons. The biggest is that we can virtualize nearly 85% of the things in there. So, we are looking at various Blade systems. Anyone have input on a particular brand or model? We are leaning towards Dell but have been told to check out the HP and IBM systems.

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Comments

Pash

As you didnt actually say what systems you are looking at locating at the data centre im gonna pipe up with:-

http://www.clearcube.com

We use their equipment for financial traders whom already have a lot of desk space clutter and don't need more

For server infrastructure I would say HP, thats what we run at some of our sites and I have never had anything bad to say about HP tbh.

dynamik

My VMware Install and Config instructor saying that he didn't really like blade servers because of the limited space. It seemed like he was constantly wanting more ram, storage, NICs, etc. Just something to think about.

astorrs

Lean towards IBM or HP and away from Dell...

Up until a year ago I would have said lean away from HP too, but the c-Class blades are a huge improvement over their past efforts. At this point they are equal in my books, both have advantages over each other but they are in minor areas (IBM has better power efficiency, HP has slightly higher density per cabinet, IBM has fewer single points of failure - but they are in areas that will probably never fail anyway, etc). Now that HP has committed to a standard chassis/blade design and won't go changing it anytime soon and have gotten together with the big name network (Cisco, Nortel, etc) and FC switch/HBA (Cisco, Brocade, Emulex, QLogic, etc) vendors to create modules for the c-Class systems (as IBM had been doing for years), you can take your pick.

Dell, although their latest effort is a big improvement over the 1855 garbage, is still too new to the market in my opinion and they are lacking that essential (to me) outside vendor support.

Do you have SAN storage already for the virtualization project? If not you might want to consider buying it at the same time from the same vendor (depending on what you're looking at) to try to take advantage of larger discounts - how large is this project? How many VMs, how many blades?

Mishra

Pash wrote:

As you didnt actually say what systems you are looking at locating at the data centre im gonna pipe up with:-

http://www.clearcube.com

We use their equipment for financial traders whom already have a lot of desk space clutter and don't need more

For server infrastructure I would say HP, thats what we run at some of our sites and I have never had anything bad to say about HP tbh.

Oh neat!

Clearcube was an exact business idea I thought up like 3-4 years ago and I saw that it came around. I've been really interested in what people had to say. I hear it's great but the equipment has failures more often than you wished.

You mind telling me some detail of what you think about the product?

astorrs

dynamik wrote:

My VMware Install and Config instructor saying that he didn't really like blade servers because of the limited space. It seemed like he was constantly wanting more ram, storage, NICs, etc. Just something to think about.

Non-issue these days with 8-16 core blades and 32-64GB RAM being the sweet spots. Combined with 4 NICs per blade and FC storage, that's between 500-2000 virtual machines in a single 42U rack. There are very few virtualization designed servers on the market right now (you know the ones with 32 memory slots) and your instructor is probably thinking of the old p-Class HP blades or similar - yuck.

astorrs

Mishra wrote:

Pash wrote:

As you didnt actually say what systems you are looking at locating at the data centre im gonna pipe up with:-

http://www.clearcube.com

We use their equipment for financial traders whom already have a lot of desk space clutter and don't need more

For server infrastructure I would say HP, thats what we run at some of our sites and I have never had anything bad to say about HP tbh.

Oh neat!

Clearcube was an exact business idea I thought up like 3-4 years ago and I saw that it came around. I've been really interested in what people had to say. I hear it's great but the equipment has failures more often than you wished.

You mind telling me some detail of what you think about the product?

Looks to be the same thing as the IBM HC10 blade & CP20 workstation combo. I would prefer to stick with a single vendor (IBM could do both workstations and servers in this case) but if I was working with an HP shop it might be a nice compliment... Like Mishra said, how do you find Clearcube works? Support any good?

Pash

Mishra wrote:

Pash wrote:

As you didnt actually say what systems you are looking at locating at the data centre im gonna pipe up with:-

http://www.clearcube.com

We use their equipment for financial traders whom already have a lot of desk space clutter and don't need more

For server infrastructure I would say HP, thats what we run at some of our sites and I have never had anything bad to say about HP tbh.

Oh neat!

Clearcube was an exact business idea I thought up like 3-4 years ago and I saw that it came around. I've been really interested in what people had to say. I hear it's great but the equipment has failures more often than you wished.

You mind telling me some detail of what you think about the product?

Id have to say overall it's not a bad product at all. We did have some issues after a building powerdown a year ago that caused some kind of video interference for the traders. However, it turned out to be a dodgy batch of power bricks for the cport receives in the trading rooms.

We have the R4300 chassis series with 8 blade pc's hooked up running over cat6 cable to the traders rooms. All in all it works nicely, generates no noise takes up no space and we have had minimal trouble I would say. For the problems we did have they were more than willing to help out

Good Product

RTmarc

We have a LeftHand SAN up and running. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.