[geeks] Cluster in a box? Interesting item on offer at eBay

[JP Hindin]

We have a Dell C5000 "microblade" system at work, as well as a couple
dozen M1000e blade systems. The C5000, which is a slightly different
design but essentially the same idea (a bunch of standalone machines in a
single case) is a horrid, horrid beast and we ended up pulling it out of
service.

Now, admittedly, we're pampered on the M1000e's with their M6xx and M7xx
blades, a really nice set of switches, CMC software and integrated DRACs
that FINALLY work properly (remote access per blade, remote media,
console, yadda).

The C5000 has none of that, but it does have IPMI... which is badly broken
and will periodically fail on the blade. Reseating the blade does not
reset the Baseboard Management Controller, you have to physically shut
down the whole unit for some idiotic reason. Without the IPMI you've lost
the ability to remote power-control the blades, amongst other things, so
you're pretty much left with a bunch of dumb-servers in a single case.
We never did determine what would trip the IPMI, but no amount of firmware
upgrades or getting Dell Support involved would fix it. It could be as
simple as a kernel build and a reboot and the BMC would croak.

Anyways. I appreciate I'm slightly OT, since the unit below is a C6100, a
somewhat older system and has a very different blade mainboard... but
given our rather horrid experiences with them I thought I'd at least
mention it.

(We had to do some pretty thorough negotiation with our technician who
flew, repeatedly, from LA to NY where the equipment was located to not
simply throw it out the window of 60 Hudson when it was deracked)

 - JP

On Thu, 6 Feb 2014, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> NOTE: I have no connection to the seller, though I did order one of these
> and currently await it's delivery.
>
> I bumped into this monster of an x86 sever available for not much money.
>
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/181306790824
>
> Is a 2U server with 3 (of a possible 4) blades, each of which has two
> six-core 1.86 GHz CPUs, 48 Gigs of RAM, and one hot-swap 250 Gig SATA drive
> (with room for two more hot-swap SATA drives, for a total of three per
> 'blade'). SAS drives are not supported, and each 'blade' has two Gigabit
> NICs and a iKVM port. It has one power supply, presumably 1,100W, that runs
> off 120/240V.
>
> The blades are based on a Tyan MB.
>
> That's 36 1.86 GHz CPU cores, 144 Gig total RAM, and six total NICs - for
> $599.99 + S/H (or best offer).
>
> That's a lot of compute power in 2U.
>
> The same vendor has other configs available with less RAM for less money,
> but this seemed a good value to me.
>
> It presents as three distinct systems, so if you want to install a licensed
> OS you'll need three licenses to run all blades.
>
> You can choose to power individual blades on or off independent of the
> other blades.
>
> For someone wanting a nice (massive) Virtualization test lab for not too
> much money, I thought this was a good deal.
>
> As I mentioned, you can make an offer if you want a better deal, my offer
> was to discount the price to include Ground S/H for the offered price...
> His near-instantaneous acceptance of my offer made me think a better deal
> was possible, of course YMMV.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Lionel Peterson
> lionel4287 at gmail.com
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