[lug] Cluster Mfr Recommends

[Michael J. Hammel]

On 2005-03-14 15:37 -0700, Steve Sullivan <Steve Sullivan wrote:
> The company I work with wants to purchase several
> linux clusters and is looking for recommendations.
> The typical cluster is 6 to 12 computers in one rack.
> Usually reliability is a big issue, with high
> availability software, fail-overs, etc.
> 
> They want Intel Pentiums and run their own version of Debian.
> They need a company that can deliver to Washington, Boulder
> and other cities.
> 
> Who would you recommend?
> 

Don't know if this will help, but....

I worked at RLXTechnologies the past year.  They made blade systems. 
But they axed their hardware biz and now just do blade management
software.  The blade guys were picked up by Intel, I think, in
Portland.  I was cut loose right before the holidays.  'Tis the biz.

While there, I got to work with SuperMicro 1U rackmounted systems. 
These were single and dual processor Intel pizza boxes.  I didn't see
anything that made them especially good or bad, but then these were
slightly modified for use by RLX.  OTS 1Us from SuperMicro are pretty
ordinary PCs.  We ran stock Debian on them, though I compiled a custom
kernel to include Adaptec RAID and 3Ware SATA drivers (both of which
were add in cards).

FWIW, SuperMicro was moderately responsive to the problems I ran into,
though I'd heard there were some issues earlier (before I got there)
with support.  My only real problems with those boxes had nothing to do
with the boxes.  We added Adaptec AACRAID controllers for SCSI RAID and
the driver was seriously broken.  I finally got a working version from
their CVS repository but I'm not sure if that version is released yet or
not.  Anyway, that wasn't SuperMicro's fault.

Another Linux vendor is Pogo Linux up in Seattle.  Haven't worked with
them but they're Linux focused.  I was going to inteview with them at
one point but kind of lost contact with the guy who asked to talk with
me.  Not sure what level of hardware they produce.

I used to work for Atipa Linux Solutions (now just Atipa, I think), but
that was during the "bubble".  I worked solely as an author for one of
their web properties at the time.  Anyway, I have one of their AMD PCs
running my firewall.  Nice box for being about 5 or 6 years old now.  No
problems with it.  But it's a straight up PC.  I don't know anything
about their Intel rack mounted systems.

I also worked with Panasas, but they're a storage company and I don't
think they sell their blades as standalone product.  Too bad, though. 
They were pretty fast systems.  Lots of memory too - 8Gig when I left, 2
years ago.  That was pretty far ahead of the curve for blades.

HP, IBM, Intel and Dell all make rack mounted blade systems.  Most are
usually delivered in 3U-6U chassis, with anywhere from 10-24 blades in a
chassis.  The most common feature is that no one really has any software
for managing provisioning of large numbers of blades - ie installing
software en-masse or running admin tasks en-masse.  RLX has that but it
was somewhat tied to their hardware when I left.  Also needs work with
scaling to very large numbers of blades, though it works well at the
level you're looking at (they only OEM it now, you'd have to find
someone else to sell it to you I think).  They're probably working to
add better generic hardware support at the moment.  Everyone else (Dell,
IBM, et al) is jiggering addons to other management software to handle
this kind of provisioning.  At least that was my take on things.  The
blade world is still evolving.

If a single cluster is "6 to 12 computers" then a blade chassis sounds
like a good fit for you.  Blades are nothing more than lots of
motherboards all talking through a common backplane in order to reduce
cabling issues and power consumption (okay, it's more than that, but it
reduces to that kind of problem).  High availability software will
probably come from a 3rd party vendor or maybe the Linux-HA project. 
RLX had some cluster add ons but I think it was just a wrapper around
some beowulf stuff.  I never saw it in action so can't really say what
it did.

Not too detailed, but hope that helped a little.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel             Never argue with an idiot.  They drag you down 
The Graphics Muse             to their level then beat you with experience.
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org    -- Dilbert
http://www.ximba.org