Xbox clusters?

[Roger L. Smith]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Brian LaMere wrote:

> advancedclustering.com, for instance.  For $2537, you get dual p3- 1ghz cpu,
> 18gb 10krpm hotswap scsi, and 2 gb ram.  All in a 1-U package, all with a 1
> year warranty.  Extended warranties available.
>
> Why the hell use HP/IBM/Compaq?  Cost almost 3 times as much.  If I put
> together at 100 node advancedclustering cluster, for the same HP price
> you'll make a ~40 node cluster.  So...I can have half of my systems be dead
> at any one point and be waiting for replacement, and /still/ have far more
> systems online.

I can tell you that IBM and Compaq are not "almost 3 times as much", at
least not for us!  We recently bought 128 dual 1GHz PIII systems (1U) x330
systems (to add to the 164 dual 1GHz PIII SGI 1100 systems already
in-house) from IBM and paid only a slight premium over those "home-made"
type vendors.

For this premium, we receive a 3 year warranty (3x the warranty you
mention).  When I have a hardware failure, I make one phone call an IBM
service engineer comes on site and fixes it.  Plus I have other goodies
such as dual PCI slots in a 1U chassis, advanced system management
processor, and their console cable chaining technology.

As we analysed which vendors to use for our cluster system, we took a lot
more into account than flops/$, and we are quite pleased with our
decision.


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| Roger L. Smith                        Phone: 662-325-3625               |
| Systems Administrator                 FAX:   662-325-7692               |
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