Sun Fire X2100 -- nForce4 Ultra desktop chipset

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 10:02 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Pointers? (Barebone with CPU and memory, no drives, good engineering,
> about 600 EUR).

Broadcom ServerWorks HT1000 chipset Socket-939 mainboards run only about
$200, and have a PCI-X slot, and well as two (2) _server_ GbE NICs with
96KiB SRAM.  Opteron 142-146 processors are only about $150-175.  Non-
registered ECC DDR SDRAM is really no premium over non-registered, non-
ECC.

It's basically the _same_ design as the Sun Fire x2100 -- Opteron and
non-registered ECC -- only a heck of a _lot_better_ mainboard.

As I mentioned, _several_ people here can help you with systems.

> It means that I don't have a storage subsystem
> which can feed each machine at 200 MByte/s. My current HA NFS
> system (dual mini-ITX) maxes out at about two orders of magnitude
> less.

That's because it has a _joke_ of an I/O subsystem.  The problem with
Mini-ITX systems is the old, slow, shared PCI bus.  You definitely will
_not_ get past 100MBps on those.  Only a few PCIe Mini-ITX mainboard are
just coming out.  That will at least help a bit.

> Distributed file systems like Lustre and PVFS scale with
> the number of nodes. For my purposes (unified filestore
> in the rack, serving the world through a single 100 MBit
> Ethernet port) it's more than sufficient. I'm more concerned
> about power requirements than speed. Another must is redundancy,
> and remote management.

Sun's not offering any lower power than what you can get from others in
an Opteron 1xxHE.

> I've never used it,

Exactly!  Most people spewing CoRAID marketing aren't familiar with its
difficiencies compared to a real SAN, or even multi-targettable SAS (if
you just want shared storage in the same closet), which are faster
(especially SAS).

CoRAID was _smart_ to hit the trade show circuit.  They've got everyone
hyped up about AoE, which is not only 1 vendor, but rather "bare boned"
in capabilities at this point.  The drivers are still be perfected, with
promised features still in development.

Trying to use a CoRAID box as a failover is about the same as using a
FireWire device.  You don't have intelligence at the target to really do
it, so it falls on GFS or something else, just like having _separate_
(not shared) storage.

> but if it provides a couple of TBytes at 30-60 MByte/s throughput and
> failover for a reasonable price (say, 3 k$) that would be sufficient.

CoRAID doesn't provide true SAN-like failover.  ;->  It requires you to
run something like GFS, which is a massive amount of overhead.  You
might as well use local storage, it won't be any worse.  And CoRAID is
just slow, without much performance over iSCSI anyway (despite the
marketing), with a lot less flexibility than iSCSI.

> Which is why I mentioned a distributed file system
> spanned over RAID 1 or RAID 5 volumes.
> I'm not interested in isolated barebones but complete systems,
> including CPU, some memory, sliding rails and IMPI or other 
> out of band LOM.

ASL offers the Monarch 811x series starting at $700+:  
  http://www.aslab.com/products/storage/monarch8115.html  

I would recommend the units with a 3Ware card for a little bit more:  
  http://www.aslab.com/products/storage/monarch8114.html  

Again, I'm sure other system integrators on this list can help you
further.

> I use Raptors in my desktop machines and home servers as the system
> drive but it is far too small for the storage volume/unit of rack
> space that I need.

I understand that, I just wanted to point out the enterprise capacities
(18, 36, 73, etc...) are available in SATA.

As I said, if you care about reliability in a commodity capacity (100,
200, 300, etc...), be sure to get a drive _explicitly_ tested and rated
for 24x7 operation, not desktop 8x5 operation.  Such models are the
Seagate NL35, Western Digital Caviar RE and others.  Not sure where the
Deskstar T7K250 fall -- they might be Hitachi's 24x7 version of the
Deskstar.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------
Some things (or athletes) money can't buy.
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