The SysAdmin Network

No more hiding in the server room

Walk away with a Slingbox!!!! Read on...

Hi all

July is going to be hardware month - and we have a prize to giveaway - a Slingbox Solo (worth $180).

Ask a colleague to take a photo of you with your favourite bit of hardware, post the photo on the Network, and then make a forum post telling us what it is and what is good about it

Then, early August, we can all have a vote on the best post, and the most popular one will win a Slingbox Solo.

So what do you all think? Come on, photograph and post away below!!!

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Permalink Reply by Chris Kamler on July 7, 2009 at 5:54pm
From Server Room

This is a picture of all the CRAP I have gotten rid of since I started Virtualizing servers... with a whole lot more to go! Pictured here is the remnants of 7 Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers and an old Sun Unix Chassis that have been "retired." We are now running 10 VM's with 20 more servers (not pictures) to add to the pile!! VMWare rules!!!
Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on July 8, 2009 at 8:02am
Hah! That's a great pic!
Permalink Reply by Chris Kamler on July 24, 2009 at 3:03pm
We're actually hoping to de-expand from two server rooms down to one with the help of VMWare. We anticipate having about 90% of our servers virtualized this time next year. (I guess I'd better get to work!!)
Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Ayer on August 3, 2009 at 5:09pm
VOTE
Permalink Reply by Jeff Hengesbach on August 11, 2009 at 6:07pm
VOTE - Gotta love virtualization
Permalink Reply by Isaac on July 8, 2009 at 8:39pm

This is a picture of me and my Sun X4500. I like it because it’s a real server with 48 drives running Solaris. So you can use it as storage over NFS, iSCSI, and SMB or you can run apps that benefit from high spindle counts directly on the server. With ZFS you also get replication, snapshotting, and more for free. It’s not the best choice for every scenario but for many situations it’s a great platform.

I wrote this (crappy) haiku about it:

Thumper roars in spring
48 SATA drives spin!
SAN vendor trembles
Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Ayer on July 9, 2009 at 9:06am
Not crappy! Your haiku rocked my morning.
Permalink Reply by Isaac on July 10, 2009 at 4:30am
Thank you, glad you liked it.

In a way I cheated a bit … the 2ed line is only 7 syllables if you pronounce SATA "Sah Tah" but that’s not how I say it when I’m talking; I usually say "Serial-A.T.A."
Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on July 10, 2009 at 2:13am
That is a damned beautiful sight.

Since I've never worked with those, how does heat dissipation work? It looks like it would get all hot and melty ;-)
Permalink Reply by Isaac on July 10, 2009 at 4:19am
It actually has really good airflow, way better than I expected, especially considering that besides the 48 drives it also has 2 Opteron sockets, 3 PCI-E slots and 16 ram slots all in 4U.

The front of the server is a grid of 10 fans for front to back airflow. As you can see in the picture the drives are placed vertically and then rotated sideways. Between each column of 4 drives is a gap of about half an inch so it forms “aisles” of cold air going through the server and the drives themselves form the airflow corridor. Because the drives are sideways the cold air goes over the top and bottom of the drives instead of being blocked by the front of the drives. In addition the drives plug into a passive cable-less backplane to further minimize air blockages. It’s a really unique design. Here is a youtube link with the designer talking about the airflow ...

When we were talking to Sun about purchasing this I was more concerned about data flows to be honest. It’s all well and good to have a bunch of drives but do you have enough bandwidth for them all? Anyway on this box they have 8 drives going into a SATA controller (dedicated port per drive) and then the 6 drive controllers are connected together with HyperTransport links. So there is no massive bottleneck anywhere in the system.

It’s clearly designed with Solaris in mind but because it’s a regular x64 machine (no special bios or anything) you can run Linux or Windows on it as well.
Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Ayer on August 3, 2009 at 5:06pm
VOTE
Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on August 4, 2009 at 3:38pm
VOTE

I can't not vote for an array of disks that looks like that!

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