[BBLISA] 1U servers needed

[Sean Lutner]

I'd look at both the Sun and HP Opteron boxes. One note however, at 
this time there is only one company making SMP Opteron boxes (at least 
the 4 way), and that is Newisys. So no matter who you but SMP Opteron 
boxes from, it's the same guts.

I have both Sun v20z and v40z servers in my lab, and they are fast 
beyond belief. I even got them attached to my HDS storage. :)

Sean
On Nov 8, 2004, at 6:47 PM, Arthur Gaer wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Dima wrote:
>
>> Quite unexpectedly, I need to build a
>> computational cluster. Something like Beouwulf.
>> To do that I need to purchase (or perhaps lease)
>> about 20 1U number crunchers. I think I need
>> Opteron machines (not quite a common thing yet) or
>> other high-end processors.
>
> We've been extremely happy with both the performance and hardware 
> quality of our Sun Opteron 1U, the V20z (they now also have a 4-way 
> Opteron 3U, the V40z).
>
> Sun is working very closely with AMD and seemingly becoming very 
> aggressive with Opteron hardware and pricing, probably to gain market 
> share while the field is still wide open.  For us, the Sun academic 
> pricing was cheaper than any "white-box" builder, with a higher 
> quality of hardware as well.
>
> My guess would be that a company as large as EMC qualifies for equally 
> aggressive discounting from Sun.
>
> Plus, Sun's Opteron servers come standard with a three-year, 
> next-business-day, on-site warranty service.
>
> You can buy the Sun Opterons with supported SUSE or RedHat 
> pre-installed at an addtional cost.  We didn't bother, just installed 
> a downloaded Linux distro with no problems--and got significantly 
> better benchmark performance than the same model machine running 
> Solaris x86.
>
> Finally, Sun does sell pre-configured rack clusters of these machines 
> which can save you some effort, though likely it costs significantly 
> more. May need to buy in increments of completely populated racks, 
> though.
>
> Don't dismiss Sun due to their currently overpriced and not terribly 
> fast SPARC machines--they really seem to be moving heavily into 
> Opterons with some very nice pricing (once you get a discount, ignore 
> the list pricing no-one pays) and they have a lot of engineering 
> brainpower and a large support operation behind their designs that 
> most other companies simply can't afford.
>
> Arthur Gaer
> gaer at math.harvard.edu
>
> Senior Systems Manager, Department of Mathematics
> Harvard University, 617-495-1610, FAX: 617-495-5132
>
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>
Sean Lutner               | www: http://www.rentul.net
e-mail: sean at rentul.net   | gpg: http://www.rentul.net/sean.sig

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
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