Fully Stocked Chassis

Comment by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on November 16, 2010 at 10:10pm

Wow, that looks super. Perhaps you could give a testimony of how those Dell blades is working for you. I've heard unflattering things about Dell blades (but then again, you can hear unflattering things about anything if you look hard enough). What's it like managing? Are you pegging all the CPUs? How does it handle the stress?

Ohhh, the questions I could ask. If I was a cat I'd have run through my nine lives before exiting the crib. =)

Comment by Dan Taylor on November 17, 2010 at 10:06am

Ask away.

To be honest I'm completely stoked with the Dell Blade System - but I've not dealt with blades made by other companies.

The CPU Usage is moderate, we don't currently push this lot as far as we should do.They're all quad core machines with the latest generation of blades being dual quad cores, so there is plenty of grunt left to wring out of the machines.

Our vague plan is to take a lot of the work loads on these machines and Virtualise them, the first and third blades are prime candidates for this being our underworked Exchange SErver and our Over worked SQL Server. We're looking to split out DW activities on to a physical server and run our OLTP stuff on Hyper-V.

The Chassis itself is well made and almost fully redundant (My last boss wouldn't pick up the tab for the second Chassis Management Controller Card - so if that goes there's no fail over, however there is a 4 hour response contract in place) there are 6 PSU's, 9 Fan's and a pair of 1 Gigabyte Ethernet Pass through Modules on the back.

Management wise, I really can't complain - they all have iDRAC enabled which provides me with a full lights out management capability - if the switches are up we can bring the chassis back from the dead. There are also management packs which integrate with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager which we're in the process of deploying to the business.

The killer feature we've got is the Dell Support Team, they've always been on hand to deal with our issues 24/7. The support is more than enough to make me stay with Dell, another company would have to move heaven and earth to get us anywhere near checking out their gear.

We've just picked up a PS4000 Equallogic SAN unit to act as a back end to these systems, so I can't wait to get that unboxed and hooked up so that we can really start pushing these machines.

Comment by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on November 17, 2010 at 8:27pm

Wow, Dell support is awesome? What support option is that? I've had hit and miss experiences with Dell support. Good to hear. I like to keep current with others' experiences so I'm not letting prejudices lock me out of a potentially good experience.

Promise to upload pics of the SAN when it arrives? =)

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