I have a bunch of IBM HS20 blades in two bladecenters, and for the
most part,
they are very decent commodity (sort of) machines.
Pros:
14 of them in 6U space. Dual processor (Intel), hardware raid-1 that
pretty
much just works, all the time. Basic RH9-friendly (soon to be
upgraded to
CentOS) /proc information about all kinds of groovy things. Management
console *rocks* for remote diagnostics, bios upgrades, remote full
lock reboots,
and a host of other things. Initial buy-in is highish, but a full
bladecenter is
pretty reasonable per-machine. Seem to run 2.4.x (old RH9 stuff)
decently,
I imagine they'll run CentOS fairly well, too. Shared CD-ROM drive for
media insertion, that can be switched remotely or by hand. Really clever
power redundancy options (see below, too).
the HS20's do run CentOS v3 -and- v4 quite nicely, I've got a number of
HS20's (sans raid, just single internal SCSI drives), and everything
just works out of box. I've installed both x86_64 and i686 on them.
PDU? Mine are just plugged into the rack's existing 208V dual rails.
i have 3GB each of ram in mine. Mine have dual Xeon 2.8Ghz CPUs w/ 2MB
cache. you can get a gigE copper 'passthrough' module that just gives
you discrete 14 ethernet cables for each port of each machine instead of
buying into their cisco or nortel switches... with hindsight, I kinda
wish I'd gotten the internal switches, would have saved a lot of cable
mess. those little tiny 'lame-o' 2.5" drives aren't laptop drives,
they are 10,000 rpm u320 scsi drives, the Seagate Savvio enterprise
drives that all the server folks are switching to as they can get more
drives in less space. I've got 2G fiberchannel adapters in my blades,
so they can talk to a SAN, and they can even boot off of iSCSI if so
configured (that I haven't tested yet)
you can also get dual Opteron blades, PowerPC blades that run AIX, and
even a Cell blade for doing Cell based scientific number crunching.
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