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

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

I forgot to add my experience with the iKVM.  It works well enough but it is clunky and relies on a Java applet, of course... make sure you have updated the BIOS/UEFI (itself a big pain), the firmware, the BMC firmware, etc. etc. It works better with some browsers than others.  Not much different functionally than the HP Proliant DL385 G2 series, which are what, 8 years old?

If you have upgraded to the latest JVM you might need to muck around with the "whitelist" feature of the new Java VM, but I have no idea how all that works.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Giagnocavo" <patrick at zill.net>
To: "The Geeks List" <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Friday, February 7, 2014 12:14:23 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Re: [geeks] Cluster in a box? Interesting item on offer at eBay

I have both the Intel versions of this chassis , and a few of the systems that are equivalent to the 3-node system boards.

1. The Intel chassis boards take between 4-5A of 110V for 4x of the nodes, with all drive bays populated with 7200rpm SATA drives and the CPUs mostly at rest but doing stuff , that is, typical Linux load, not heavy CPU computation or whatnot (each board 2x L5520 and 48GB RAM).

2. The AMD-equivalent systems use only slightly more than 1A with 4 drives and 32GB, so, I would estimate about 1A per node.

3. The 1100W power supplies are designed to handle whatever kind of node/cpu combination, so, they made them larger due to the X series CPUs that could go in them, like the X5560.

4. the 1100W power supplies are supposed to be 94% efficiency.

Cheers

Patrick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel Peterson" <lionel4287 at gmail.com>
To: "The Geeks List" <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Friday, February 7, 2014 11:06:17 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Re: [geeks] Cluster in a box? Interesting item on offer at eBay

Desk side is a euphemism for down the hall, in a server rack. I am not foolish
enough to mean desk side literally. ;^)

The actual power consumption is rated at about 285 watts/blade, and the
ability to spin the blades up or down as needed/desired I think it should be
OK.

It is my hope to consolidate down several white box 'servers' into this one
chassis for non-production home lab use...

Once I move to Dallas I don't know what I'll do - the whole 'no basement'
thing is gonna be a problem... I am thinking rack & desk in the garage, but it
can get quite toasty in TX in the summer... Maybe I need to look into 'warm'
data center operation?

Lionel

> On Feb 7, 2014, at 12:47 PM, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org>
wrote:
>
> I'll be interested to see what you think of running it "deskside" at home
> is like.
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