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

[Patrick Finnegan]

This is basically the equivalent of a blade chassis, only made to be
cheaper (no shared kvm, no ethernet or other switch, etc).  It's the same
density as eg, IBM's BladeCenter H (14 @ 2 socket servers in 7U).

Pat


On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
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