Linux Clustering Hardware?

Kanagawa asks: "The last few years have seen a slew of new Linux clustering and blade-server hardware solutions; they're being offered by the likes of HP, IBM, and smaller companies like Penguin Computing. We've been using the HP gear for awhile with mixed results and have decided to re-evaluate other solutions. We can't help but notice that the Google gear in our co-lo appears to be off-the-shelf motherboards screwed to aluminum shelves. So, it's making us curious. What have Slashdot's famed readers found to be reliable and cost effective for clustering? Do you prefer blade server forms, white-box rack mount units, or high-end multi-CPU servers? And, most importantly, what do you look for when making a choice?"

Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on

(a) Your cost budget

(b) Your work requirement: A Search engine is different from a weather forecast center.

(c) Cost of ownership which includes maintenance etc

Dual Core Opteron Blades

[municio]

At the current time I would choose blades based on dual core Opterons form many reasons. Some of the main ones are:

- Price
- Software availability
- Power consumption
- Density

Brand depends on what your company is confortable with. Some companies would want to have the backing of IBM, SUN or HP. Others will be quite satisfied with in house built blades. This days it's quite easy to build your own blade, some mother boards builders take care of almost all components and complexity (for example Tyan). But again, maybe the PHBs at your gig will run for the hills if you mention the word motherboard alone.

Read the Google paper !

[devitto]

In the paper, it goes into tedious detail on the architecture and low-level operation of the application. Why do you think it does this? Because it is the application that *totally* depicts the solution, they chose lots of systems because of reliability, they made those systems "desktop class" because they didn't get much extra from using super-MP/MC systems.

It's a great article, I strongely suggest you read properly, and do what they said they did - evaluate need against what's available.

Cheap isnt always the way to go

[oh_the_humanity]

When doing clkustering and super computer work. Cheap isnt always the best way to go , if you take into consideration that 5 - 10 % of nodes will either not be functioning correctly or will have some sort of hardware failure. The more you cluster the more man power it takes to repair these nodes. if you buy 1000 $499 colomachines , and 50 of them are failing at any given time, it becomes very time consuming and tedious to keep the cluster going. Spending the extra bucks on high quality hardware , will save you money and head ache in the end. I always use the analogy when talking to older folks who want to get started in computers. spend the extra bucks to get a new machine. The extra money you spend on buying new good equipment , will more than pay for itself in comparison , to the amount of frustration you get from buying old used slow computers. My $.2

Not everyone can be Google

[Anthony Liguori]

It's tempting to just go buy a bunch of motherboards on ebay and some bread racks to build your cluster. It's certainly the cheapest and most flexible approach.

However, it takes a special type of people to manage that kind of hardware. You have to deal with a high amount of failure, you have to be extra careful to avoid static problems, you've got to really think through how your going to wire things.

On the other hand, if you get something like a IBM BladeCenter, you have a very similar solution that may cost a little more but is significantly more reliable. More importantly, blades are just as robust as a normal server. You don't have to worry about your PHB not grounding himself properly when he goes to look at what you've setup.

I expect blades are going to be the standard form factor in the future. It just makes sense to centralize all of the cooling, power, and IO devices.

It's not that the MegaRAID cards are bad...

[Ayanami Rei]

...it's the firmware Dell shoves on them.
It's only designed to hook up with Dell disc arrays and tape drives and everything else can shove it (from their point of view).
Do yourself a favor and skip 'em and just by the cards straight from LSI.

Re:No one size fits all answer but here is mine :)

[Bert64]

There are cheaper vendors out there than sun. Sun are known for producing premium hardware whereas dell are known for producing bargain bucket hardware... A better comparison would be to look at a vendor who produces both xeon and opteron hardware, such as HP or IBM.

Re:Depends

[RogerWiclo]

Congratulations! You get the honor the first post AND mod points for insightful, and you didn't have any useful information.

Re:We do nice house built clusters

[grozzie2]

I'm curious as to why video is even relavent, never mind essential, for a cluster node? Just another part generating heat, that is serving no purpose other than to possibly pacify a brain dead bios at boot time. Brain dead bios is fixable, heat takes real effort to get rid of it. Seems like a total waste to put video into a machine that's gonna sit in a rack, and likely never have a monitor plugged into it. Seems like an even bigger waste to actually plug some sort of video output device into it.

Re:Check out Xserve

[lakeland]

*shrug* he's being honest about working for apple. I'd rather have that than him talking about it as if he was just a knowledgeable third party.

Re:XServe

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple may be targeting the enterprise, but they are off target.

Let us compare, shall we?

Sun & HP & IBM all are perfectly willing to have response times under 4 hours. Not 4 business hours, not 365.24 days per year except.... 365.24 days per year period.

Does Apple do that? No.

Let's take sysadmin certification. Are they like Sun, HP, and IBM's AIX certs where they are good for the version of their OS you take it for? Or is it like Microsoft's, where it expires? Is it one test or set of tests...or is it a la cart? Hmmm, it is like Microsoft's.

Nope, Apple isn't serious about the enterprise, at least not where Unix is concerned.

By the way, for the original poster: Here's a nickle, sonny; get yourself a real computer. http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/>