[geeks] Cluster in a box? Interesting item on offer at eBay

[Lionel Peterson]

NOTE: I have no connection to the seller, though I did order one of these
and currently await it's delivery.

I bumped into this monster of an x86 sever available for not much money.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/181306790824

Is a 2U server with 3 (of a possible 4) blades, each of which has two
six-core 1.86 GHz CPUs, 48 Gigs of RAM, and one hot-swap 250 Gig SATA drive
(with room for two more hot-swap SATA drives, for a total of three per
'blade'). SAS drives are not supported, and each 'blade' has two Gigabit
NICs and a iKVM port. It has one power supply, presumably 1,100W, that runs
off 120/240V.

The blades are based on a Tyan MB.

That's 36 1.86 GHz CPU cores, 144 Gig total RAM, and six total NICs - for
$599.99 + S/H (or best offer).

That's a lot of compute power in 2U.

The same vendor has other configs available with less RAM for less money,
but this seemed a good value to me.

It presents as three distinct systems, so if you want to install a licensed
OS you'll need three licenses to run all blades.

You can choose to power individual blades on or off independent of the
other blades.

For someone wanting a nice (massive) Virtualization test lab for not too
much money, I thought this was a good deal.

As I mentioned, you can make an offer if you want a better deal, my offer
was to discount the price to include Ground S/H for the offered price...
His near-instantaneous acceptance of my offer made me think a better deal
was possible, of course YMMV.




-- 
Lionel Peterson
lionel4287 at gmail.com