[geeks] *DROOL*

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, January 29, 2002 at 01:34:44 (-0500), James Sharp wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] *DROOL*
>
> Cost effectiveness?  Hmm...half a million for racks and racks of PCs.
> Much less than that for an E450 that will eat them all for lunch.  Not to
> mention the extra man power you need to manage the racks and racks.  Sure,
> they can all be images...but still, someone has to keep at least half an
> eye on each of them.  Don't forget to add the cost and maintenance of the
> load balancer in there.

I'll bet most people buying such piles of hardware won't be using load
balancers in the way you think.

There's an even more insidious problem with having 280 machines in one
rack, at least with Compaq's current design.  Their cages have no way to
connect serial consoles externally, and their administration option is a
terminal server on the interconnect card -- which only connects to the
twenty blades in the shelf.  So you end up burning 14 IP#s and hub ports
on 14 terminal servers per rack too.  The only good thing about this is
you only have 14 more cables per rack to connect instead of 280!  ;-)

> Simple space management?  Hrm.  48 1U PCs in one rack...or one 6 or 7u
> E450.

Well it is a big, or rather HUGE, advantage for the likes of google who
design their architecture around small easily replaced computing units
like PCs.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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