Re: Spend 7K *WHERE*? WAS Intel SRCS16 SATA raid? and How

Rod Taylor wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 15:43 -0500, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
>> * I agree with the threads that more disks are better.
>> * I also agree that SCSI is better, but can be hard to justify

Here's another approach to spend $7000 that we're currently
trying.... but it'll only work for certain systems if you can
use load balancing and/or application level partitioning
of your software.

For $859 you can buy
a Dell SC1425 with (*see footnote)
2 Xeon 2.8GHz processors (*see footnote)
1 GB ram
1 80GB hard drive. (*see footnote)

Doing the math, it seems I could get 8 of
these systems for that $6870, giving me:
16 Xeon processors (*see footnote),
640 GB of disk space spread over 8 spindles
8 GB of ram
16 1Gbps network adapters.

Despite the non-optimal hardware (* see footnote), the price
of each system and extra redundancy may make up the difference
for some applications.

For example, I didn't see many other $7000 proposals have
have nearly 10GB of ram, or over a dozen CPUs (even counting
the raid controllers), or over a half a terrabyte of storage ,
or capable of 5-10 Gbit/sec of network traffic... The extra
capacity would allow me to have redundancy that would somewhat
make up for the flakier hardware, no raid, etc.

Thoughts? Over the next couple months I'll be evaluating
a cluster of 4 systems almost exactly as I described (but
with cheaper dual hard drives in each system), for a GIS
system that does lend itself well to application-level
partitioning.

Ron

(* footnotes)
Yeah, I know some reports here say that dual Xeons can suck;
but Dell's throwing in the second one for free.
Yeah, I know some reports here say Dells can suck, but it
was easy to get a price quote online, and they're a nice
business partner of ours.
Yeah, I should get 2 hard drives in each system, but Dell
wanting an additional $160 for a 80GB hard drive is not a good deal.
Yeah, I know I'd be better off with 2GB ram, but Dell
wants $400 (half the price of an entire additional
system) for the upgrade from 1GB to 2.

I also realize that application level partitioning needed
to take advantage of a loose cluster like this is not practical
for many applications.