And Mikan Makes Two

The second server for the new hypercluster is being provisioned right now.  Mikan* is just a baby compared to Akane - a quad-core Xeon 3230, but with just 2GB of memory and one 250GB drive.

Fortunately, Mikan's main job is to sit there and look pretty...  And to contribute 4TB of bandwidth to our monthly quota.  I used a different promo code this time - double bandwidth instead of double memory and disk - because Akane has all the memory and disk we need but only comes with 2TB of bandwidth against the 3TB+ we are using.

Thanks to the special offer, Mikan gives us a spare server and 4TB of bandwidth for the price of 2TB of excess bandwidth charges.  That means that right now it's effectively a very cheap spare server, and going forward it will actually be saving me up to $200 a month.

I can also run a instance of Minx on there to use the spare CPU power, which was why I went for the Xeon 3230.  The cheapest option was a Xeon 3050, a dual-core 2.13GHz CPU.  The 3230 cost 25% more, but it's a quad-core 2.66GHz chip, so it's 2.5x as fast.  Which seems like a good deal to me.

This will be really nice once Akane is configured (trying another OpenVZ kernel now).  We won't need to move to a new server for a good long time: We have 4TB of RAID-5 disk and an SSD for the databases, and room for another 5-disk RAID array and another SSD.  And we can upgrade from 24GB of memory to 72GB now, and to 144GB once 8GB modules come down in price.  And we can upgrade our 2.26GHz CPUs to quad-core 2.93GHz CPUs now, and to six-core CPUs in the future.

I can just add little FEP (front-end processor) / bandwidth pool machines like Mikan as we continue to grow; the next one is destined to be named Kurumi.**

Update: Splatooie!  Oh well.  I have an Intel kernel module driver thingy here to try next.

* A mandarin, also a shade of orange.
** Walnut, both the nut itself and the colour.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:32 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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