Sysadmins United - Latest Comments

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

shokk — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:57:58 -0000

We use the Bladecenters for Windows and Linux production and VMWare which hosts our test and dev Windows and Linux environments. The throughput is sweet and we really don't see any contention. The wiring is much easier, and the literature about the benefits of power, I/O, and hardware consolidation are right on. We're about to roll out a VDI solution from another chassis which I've been eagerly drooling over. Some of these blades are dual quad-core and 32GB of memory booting VMWare ESX over fibre SAN, so they're making the most out of the consolidation possibilities.

Re: EMC CLARiiON Days

shokk — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:53:06 -0000

We have Clariions serving LUNs to VMWare, Windows, Linux, and Solaris, but no NAS. They're much nicer boxes than the NetApp ever were. We're about to have a Celerra delivered, which looks really similar to what we saw on NetApp with a bunch more replication features thrown in. Probably not all as nice as the Hitachi. I've never used those but I've heard they are considered top of the line. Didn't you use Clariion at a previous place?

We also have a pair of Centera replicating between Production and DR environments, but they are hosting nothing yet because of an issue with Symantec Antivirus interfering with DiskXtender. How are you using your Centera?

Re: EMC CLARiiON Days

Chris McComas — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:56:21 -0000

We only have the EMC Centara installed. I wish we had more of the high end stuff but the powers that be like Hitachi Datasystems.

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

Chris McComas — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:46:04 -0000

We don't have have any production blade systems installed. Only our colo clients have them in our datacenter. It would make our cabinet use more efficent and wireing easy if we did. How is the speed and thruput on the blade centers?

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

shokk — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:50:48 -0000

I haven't touched InfiniBand yet, but for our fiber we made some very loose loops to keep it from getting too sharp a bend radius. Turns out that's really not necessary anymore.

Our bladecenter power cables are really long and we've had to loop them up a bit in the cabinet. Luckily you only have 4 in a cabinet, so there really aren't that many cables in there. And that gets you 56 systems in the cabinet! We have the slots for InfiniBand on these chassis, but nothing in them.

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

Chris McComas — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:30:27 -0000

We use the velcro and it works out really nice. The cabinets are somewhat neat and clean depending on who did the installation of the server. We also had custom power cables made so we don't have that extra loop or two in the cable managment... really makes a diffrence. We do need to come up with something better for the InfiniBand it's really hard to keep from kinking it.... any recommendations?