[lug] number cruncher

[Sean Reifschneider]

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On 08/23/2010 03:39 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> low if you know what you want.  I like the Twin^2 systems - 4 nodes in 2U.

The Twin2 system vendor is Supermicro.  We've been using Supermicro gear
and been quite happy with it, though we have been having to replace power
supplies quite a bit over the last year.  We've been using Supermicros for
the last decade, and haven't even had to replace power supplies until this
last year, and that's been on "only" <2 year old gear, so something
changed.

The funny thing is that older machines use the same part number and vendor
for the power supply (ablecom? I can't recall exactly off hand).

Anyway, I'm still very happy with the Supermicro boxes, particularly as
newer ones are coming with square hole rack mounting rails -- that makes
our lives easier.

Anyway, I'd say go to supermicro.com and shop for the gear you want there,
then once you've picked what you want, search for the reseller to buy them
from.  We just buy the barebones boxes and add our own CPU and RAM and
discs.  But there are tons of places that will put these in and test for
you.

If you need a lot of RAM (48GB+), the AMD-based systems are probably the
least expensive way to go, since they seem to have way more memory sockets
and use less expensive DDR2 RAM.  We mostly use the Intel-based systems.

The nice thing about the Twin2 systems is that you get redundant,
hot-swap power supplies easily if not included.  The down side is
that if you have the chassis racked and you need to pull one of the 4
nodes to do testing at another location (say, it's acting funny), you
can't just plug in the node to a standard power cable and try it out.
It's really meant to be run in the chassis only.

It also ends up being REAL tight cabling wise.  You have a 2U server that
taking up 12 Ethernet cables (2 for the data and one IPMI management port
per node).  They will boot iSCSI, and that have locator lights on them and
more.  They're real nice, but we're only just starting to play with them.
Cost is around $2400, but that's for 4 nodes so the price is around $600
each; not bad when compared to a stand-alone node with redundant power and
IPMI+KVM.  Plus it's a 95% efficient power supply.

Those machines we've given away at the LUG meetings?  Those have pretty
much all been Supermicro boxes.

Sean
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