[Bioclusters] notes and pictures from a "wet lab baby-biocluster" project

Matt Hudson matthuds at gmail.com
Mon Mar 21 19:26:34 EST 2005


I'm interested by your choice of setup.

We've got a cluster that bears a resemblance to this one, we have 30
IBM e series IU duals (older X330 Pentium 3 machines), a Dell
PowerVault 14x146GB U320 SCSI storage unit and a cheap Netgear switch.

Two questions:

1) One thing I liked about the e series is the KVM daisy chain
function; although I can see this is less useful for only 6 machines,
I'm wondering if you chose not to buy it or if they've stopped
offering this. It is great when it works, but it is very picky about
keyboards, seems only to work with Microsoft branded ones (not IBM,
strangely).

 2) I take it that your application requires massive storage that
isn't particularly fast, hence the array of ATA disks. Or is there
something about the Apple that I'm missing? I would like to see how
its performance over fiber channel compares with an Ultra 320 SCSI
array controlled directly by the head node. 5.6 TB is an impressive
amount of storage.


On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 13:09:24 -0500, jason.calvert at novartis.com
<jason.calvert at novartis.com> wrote:
> I can confirm they are "generic" rail kits.  I have racked them in dell, apc, and ibm racks.
> 
> Jason
> -----------------
> Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld.
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: bioclusters-bounces+jason.calvert=pharma.novartis.com
> Sent: 03/18/2005 12:59 PM
> To: bioclusters at bioinformatics.org
> Subject: Re: [Bioclusters] notes and pictures from a "wet lab baby-biocluster"  project
> 
> Chris,
>         I would be surprised if this was true as I just installed 2x 336
> and a 335 eServer into our non-IBM standard 19" rack a couple of weeks
> ago.  The rails they came with fit just fine.  The rack mount instructions
> even had several notes on how to modify the rails if it didn't fit your
> non-IBM rack.  I didn't have to do any modifications to the rails.
> 
> Josh
> 
> >The biggest problem with IBM and the reason I'll probably never purchase
> >eSeries servers again is that apparently IBM refuses to sell any sort
> >generic rail mounting kits for the e-series product line (this is what
> >the integrator told me; have not verified this yet). They ship with rail
> >kits that *only* work in IBM branded server cabinets. Given that we were
> >installing into a non-IBM 12U cabinet this was a big issue. Our
> >integrator found a 3rd party rail reseller that makes compatible rails
> >but we could not order them in time. To me this is just annoying and (if
> >true) due to the annoyance factor I'll probably buy my dual Opterons
> >from Sun in the future (assuming Sun will sell me a generic rail kit...)
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