Hardware pron thread

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fractal

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Jun 7, 2016
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I pulled a rack out of the pile in the middle of the garage to build an openstack cluster and, of course, it was not empty. So, I worked around what was there. How much of the equipment can YOU identify.

 

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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@wiretap that is awesome! Hoping the Fedex Freight truck arrives today so I have something to contribute to this thread.
 

cesmith9999

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Mar 26, 2013
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ahh the memories of NT on Alpha... and running word macros 10x faster than PC's...

and bad memories if Itanium...

Chris
 

TuxDude

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Sep 17, 2011
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Since this thread got bumped anyways..... Here's a blurry cell-phone pic of a shelf I stuck in a rack this morning...



Thats 14x 3.84TB dual-port SAS SSD's to add to our Compellent array, which will become the new tier-1 disk class, moving the 15K drives down to tier-2, and the 7K drives stay in tier-3. The whole array looks like this:

 

wiretap

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Jul 14, 2015
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Since I posted an Alpha CPU, here's the others. I've got about 20 of them at work. All DS20E's and DS10's. Still humming along with years of uptime, no reboots/failovers/shutdowns. OpenVMS ftw. They are being retired next year, so I'll snag some to take home.





 
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whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Bastards making me jealous today...I need to get into our Chicago DC and snap some pics of our Cisco UCS fujitsu C880's that we are playing guinea pigs for Cisco.

CPU Eight Intel E7-8890 v2 or E7-8880 v3 Series processors with a "glueless" design
Memory 2 TB to 6 TB configurations

6TB memory in each node (x's 8) make for INSANE SAP HANA workload crunching! (to the tune of hundreds to thousands of times better performance depending on what analytics dataset we are pounding on compared to our old SAN/disk based config)

That's our BABY SAP HANA gear...gonna have to go to SGI for NumaLink tech for our next gen rev w/ 12-16TB memory in each node. woohoooo, fun times ahead!

Of interesting note I saw HPE snatch up SGI recently right?
 
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TuxDude

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Sep 17, 2011
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@Patrick - those 930's are nice units, I remember looking at one in person at last years Dell World. And I see you have all of the NVMe bays populated. Thats a fair bit bigger iron than we have around here, our newest/fastest boxes are 8 R730's with 768GB of RAM each running a Nutanix cluster for VDI workloads.
 
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Patrick

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@Patrick - those 930's are nice units, I remember looking at one in person at last years Dell World. And I see you have all of the NVMe bays populated. Thats a fair bit bigger iron than we have around here, our newest/fastest boxes are 8 R730's with 768GB of RAM each running a Nutanix cluster for VDI workloads.
I have to admit, having this one in the lab and getting some hands-on time (I installed 40GbE/ and 4x 10GbE NICs) does make me want one simply for the flexibility of the platform.
 

TuxDude

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I have to admit, having this one in the lab and getting some hands-on time (I installed 40GbE/ and 4x 10GbE NICs) does make me want one simply for the flexibility of the platform.
Ya - just thinking about what I could build with such a thing (or a bunch of them) fills my head with crazy ideas.

But back in real life things work in the other direction - I have workloads that need the most effective hardware to run them, and at least for typical enterprise server virtualization and/or VDI twice as many 2U dual-socket nodes usually ends up being a better fit. That 930 is awesome, but in a cluster of them with terabytes of RAM each how long would it take to get one into maintenance mode? And do I really want to have that many eggs in each basket when considering what happens when one crashes/fails.
 

Gerk

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Oct 24, 2016
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I have a buddy who was on the processor design team for Alpha's ... they were years ahead of their time.

Just for fun, out with the (really) old, in with the (slightly) new(er) in my rack.

Old:
HP DL 380 G5, 2xXeon 3Ghz dual core, 32GB Ram
HP DL 580 G5, 4xXeon 2.2Ghz hex core, 256GB Ram


New(er):
Dell R710, 4x Xeon 2.2Ghz quad core, 96GB ram (esxi)
Dell r900, 4x Xeon 2.6Ghz quad core, 256GB ram (FreeNAS)
Norco 4224 (top, half full)
2x Dell MD1000 (between 710 and 900)
 
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