[K12OSN] Blade Server for LTSP?

[Jim Kronebusch]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:40:07 -0400, Steven Santos wrote
> Jim, did you ever get any answers about this question?

No, but I did contact Dell.  From my gathering if someone wants to build the
ultimate LTSP cluster, these are the ticket.  However not cost effective
unless you populate the chassis with at least 7 blades (takes a while to cover
the cost of the chassis, and they'll hold 10 blades).  

But each blade can function as it's own server (up to 10 blades per chassis)
and each blade can handle up to 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon 5355's (2x4 MB Cache,
2.66GHz, 1333MHz FSB), 16GB RAM, and 2 SATA or SAS hard drives.  Each blade is
able to talk to all other blades via the chassis backplane (alternative to a
management LAN).  Also if you have a fiber channel storage device it is able
to plug directly into the back of the chassis and be able to be used by all
blades locally (no need to share /home from a RAID array via NFS, just mount
locally).  Also they accept managed switch modules which are totally
configurable.  You can assign ports to specific VLAN's, team multiple ports to
specific blades, or just assign a single port to each blade.

So I could actually make blade 1 my LDAP, blade 2 my LTSP boot server, blades
3-5 application servers, blade 6 my mail server, then attach an external fiber
RAID array and mount as /home to all servers that would need it.  LDAP auth
would happen internally across the backplane.

I could consolidate my whole head end into a single 7U chassis, very cool. 
And since /home, LDAP and application serving would only happen at the
backplane level I am sure it would alleviate network congestion and speed
things up.

But I have a handful of servers and a PowerVault 220s already, not sure I can
justify the cost.  But it sure would be my choice at this point for a
completely new setup.

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