[geeks] Disney going to HP Linux for animation

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, June 19, 2002 at 08:59:05 (+0200), Bjorn Ramqvist wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Disney going to HP Linux for animation
>
> "Greg A. Woods" wrote:
> > 
> > Any word on the "blade" boxes?  I don't know a heck of a lot about the
> > HP blade servers, but they look very good on paper.  The compaq blade
> > crap is just that -- proprietary stupidly designed crap.
> 
> The Compaq blades suck, IMHO. Who wants a 2.5" IDE drive in their
> "server"? OK, it's fine for DNS, small mailing and all that, but when do
> WE at $company need 30+ DNS-servers? Christ.

Yeah, that was one of my thoughts -- but I also detest the proprietary
shelf, proprietary termserver with stupid connection engineering, and
other stupid connectivity requirements for all the cards.  Trust Compaq
to come up with something entirely unlike what the rest of the
electronics industry is using.

> In my eyes, the only winners in the whole blade-debate would probably be
> Dell, which incorporates proper SCSI on their machines. It takes more
> space, but that's not a big issue.

Hmmm.... I didn't know Dell was in on the "blade" game -- but it makes
sense.  I'll take a look at them, thanks!

I wonder where IBM is at in this market....

> Man, why even buy blades when there
> are 1U servers out there?
> Cramming 42 units inside a 42U cabinet would be enough IMO. (Or even 47
> units, with Compaqs 10647 rack)

Well, I'd rather have blade servers any day.  All those little tiny
power supplies and little tiny fans and such are very prone to failure.
I'd rather have good large N+1 redundant hot-swap units on one big
chassis.  I can swap a single card a lot easier than I can swap an
entire unit too, even I've got cable arms and sliders and everything
(eg. like the Apple Xserve, which comes with all that stuff out of the
box).

If I'm not mistaken HP is just using CompactPCI chassis with ordinary
form-factor CPU cards plugged into what's probably an mostly ordinary
backplane.  Now that's good smart engineering!

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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