hi,

any one got any experiance with blade servers?? IBM, Clear cube or HP. Part of my department are planning on using them on a development system I'm interested in any one got any thoughts, opinions etc on them,

cheers

PXH blackmagic

IBM ones are great Did you have any questions in particular?

Chris

reliability, how good is the hardware maintainance e.g hot swappable boards and power supplies?, basicly R+D want to replace a bespoke built system, which is physically redundant and secure, based on VME type system with fast procesor boards etc with a blade system, just concerned were going to be left with a pile of trash just for the sake of "going to windows"

Id go for HP... theyve put alot of development into their blades.. the ILO tech is very reliable and flexible.

Steer clear from Dell blades though. We have a 1655C and every blade has had a piece of hardware fail on it. Harddisks, Motherboards, etc.

IBM and HP are def the ones to go for

reliability, how good is the hardware maintainance e.g hot swappable boards and power supplies?, basicly R+D want to replace a bespoke built system, which is physically redundant and secure, based on VME type system with fast procesor boards etc with a blade system, just concerned were going to be left with a pile of trash just for the sake of "going to windows"

I've played with our IBM blade servers (pulling disks and power supplies while they're running) and have been very impressed by their resilience, and we've had no problems at all with reliability in all the time we've owned and used them. No experience of HP to compare them to though...

Chris

....... in all the time we've owned and used them.....

Chris

I would think your company has used them for some time, Chris? Possibly since their conception

I would think your company has used them for some time, Chris? Possibly since their conception

My company? I wish Sadly our dept has only got hold of some in the last 6 months or so. Takes us ages to get the good stuff

Chris

thanks for the replies, I'll have to wait and see what sort of hash of a system r+D wil come up with this time, still finding lots fo ways to break the last system they built, - muppets relied on windows 2000 inbuilt security for one of our systems, today i managed to change the administrator password without having it in the first place lol!, man i love my job - paid to break expensive things lol!

If performance isn't the main reason you could go for virtual server, we use it very extensively these days.

The kind of setup we run is a dedicated dbase server running SQL Server 2000, with a nice disc subsystem for speed/reliability/etc.

Then we have one (soon to be two) virtual server host machines, running W2K3 Server, the VS software. These are running several images each. Each image in our case is W2K3 as well, but you can use other OS too, possibly including non-MS ones, but no doubt they'll be less efficient :P

Big benefit is that you can clone these images easily, automate deployment if need be (we have a set of base images that I clone, auto-add/start, tweak settings with logon scripts etc). Performance wise they are not anywhere near a blade's performance, but cost-wise the same applies.

If you're able to get a bunch of cash then blades are much nicer (not that I'm jealous :P )

Blades are nice, the only limits I see are related to expandability. If you want to add another network card or a fibre channel card (or two!). Also, while the on-board network cards are usually OK, you're a bit stuck if you hit any compatability issues with them. (We've seen this situation, but we do some odd stuff with servers)

Phil

This application is not your normal office it infrasturcture, it will be used for taking data in from several senser sources (e.g radar esque type stuff/synchro servo motion sensors etc ) use that data in kalman filters to carry out target motion analysis and then provide the data and control to common HMI console distributed over the platform, and al runing on an ethernet backbone.

Yeah - virtual servers would be a non-starter for that, too critical.

Our applications are business critical too, but for test purposes we put up with that speed degrading side of things as we can reduce volume throughputs.

Sounds like a beast of an application you've got on the go there, must be interesting to work on

We run around 30 of HP's DL380's and one or two DL360's - Pretty much all of which are only Citrix servers mind you, with the exception of the DC, Exchange and Blackberry servers and a couple SQL's - and never had a single problem in the past 13 months I've been around.

(I'll even vouch for HP's support - They hand-delivered some new drives this week for one of our array's. They arrived 2 hours after reporting it! Makes a suprising change for IT suppliers)

yes my work is interesting, I work as a systems engineer/integrator, on military naval vessels, someof the computing power we use is on a rediculous scale, most of the current equiment uses external chilled water supply!, will be interesting if the blade servers will be able to cut down on the 10 to 15 cabinets of computers we use at the moment!!

I've got two racks in my loft - don't ask :P - the real problem is mid-summer when getting rid of the heat was getting a challenge. (Un)fortunately I'm not allowed to change to watercooling them though

Nice job though for sure & sounds like fun