On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 18:22 +0100, Virginian wrote: > I was hit by a rather large electricity bill recently (at home). My > current cluster set up comprises 2 x HP Proliant DL380 G3s and an MSA > 500 storage array (all three are very heavy on the juice!). I decided > that if I want to continue playing with RHCS at home I needed to look > for a cheaper, greener option. I can easily get a couple of PC's (dual > or quad core cpus and plenty of RAM for running a virtualised cluster) > but the stumbling block has been a cheap low power shared storage > solution. The best that I have come up with so far is an offering from > Maxtor and from LaCie, which basically comprises an esata disk > enclosure that has two firewire 800 ports. I believe that Linux will > support these dual firewire 800 enclosures but I am a little concerned > about the speed (91MB/s) in comparison to a SCSI disk array. Ideally, > I would prefer a disk enclosure / array with dual esata ports but I > haven't been able to find anything. > > My question is, does anybody have a low cost hardware specification > that they are running xen and RHCS on with shared storage that won't > cost the earth and won't hit me in the wallet when it comes to paying > the electricity bill? The cheapest shared storage you are going to get is FireWire. You cannot do shared storage with eSATA. Thing of FireWire as a cheap mans Fibre Channel network in loop mode. However I would roll your own firewire enclosure and fit it out with some Western Digital VelociRaptor 10k RPM drives. As I would say I/O's per second is more important than actual throughput. You could also cheat a bit if you are using more than one physical drive, and use a bridge board per drive, and wire each drive back to the server. I reckon that you could do a couple of quad code nodes, with two 300GB VelociRaptor drives with a power budget under 400W easily, and less if you pay for laptop parts. There are also some nice cases that take two mini-ITX boards if you want to go small. JAB. -- Jonathan A. Buzzard Tel: +441382-386998 Storage Administrator, College of Life Sciences University of Dundee, DD1 5EH -- Linux-cluster mailing list Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
