Sunday, August 08

Geek

The Possibilities...

Supermicro SC217 Chassis $919
Supermicro H8DGT Motherboard x4 $1700
AMD Opteron 6128 CPU x8 $2288
4GB DDR3-1333 ECC Registered RAM x32 $4256
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB x24 $3240

Total: $12,403

Okay, that's a lot of money, yes.

But what you get for that is a 64-processor server with 128GB of RAM and 12TB of disk with a 96GB non-volatile cache.

Which fits in 2U of rack space.

It actually has room for 48 CPUs and 512GB of RAM, but that would blow the price out to $33,555, which is a wee bit expensive.

There's also a version of the motherboard with built-in QDR Infiniband, but it costs twice as much.

Or this, for storage:

Supermicro 36-bay chassis with DP motherboard and RAID controller $2569
AMD Opteron 6128 CPU x2 $572
4GB DDR3-1333 ECC Registered RAM x8 $1104
Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB x36 $4140

Total: $8385

Or finally:

Supermicro 6-bay chassis with QP motherboard: $1993
AMD Opteron 6128 CPU x4 $1144
4GB DDR3-1333 ECC Registered RAM x32 $4256
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB x6 $954

Total: $8347

I don't need 72TB of disk space, but I know someone who does.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:53 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 190 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Hey, a mid-range MongoDB server!

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 09 2010 01:47 AM (2XtN5)

2 In fact, that's exactly what I had in mind.  At least, partly.

I was looking at using MongoDB for Minx; unfortunately, it doesn't like OpenVZ at all; if your database is bigger than the memory available to the virtual machine, MongoDB will crash.  (It's a known bug and they're working on it, but it would require a whole new storage engine to fix.)

This system is actually four 16-core 32GB servers packed into a 2U chassis.  So one for the applications, one for MongoDB, and two for Counterstrike.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 09 2010 11:47 AM (PiXy!)

3 Of all the NoSQL databases I've looked a recently, the three that are most interesting are MongoDB - which crashes under OpenVZ; Redis - which requires all data to be in memory at all times; and Keyspace - which is a simple, reliable, key-value store that actually lets you inspect the keys (which almost nothing else does).

Naturally, the developers of Keyspace are dropping it to move on to a new project. neutral

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 09 2010 11:49 AM (PiXy!)

4 Thanks for not looking at Couch at least. Man that thing was ugh. Mongo I actually considered. The problem is, however, it's not a better db4 than db4 (that would be Tokyo and now Kyoto cabinets). If you use Mongo as a drop-in nosql, you win exactly nothing. To get the advantage, you have to steal from J.Greely's playbook (of course I had his blog posts squirreled away for a better time). You have to make your application to use Mongo, and that loses you portability. You are a slave to Mongo from that point on.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, August 09 2010 01:13 PM (/ppBw)

5 Yeah, even after testing at full scale, I had to basically start over from scratch when I ran into some of the more interesting limitations in 1.4.x. Once the 1.6 branch stabilizes a bit, I may be able to get closer to what I originally wanted.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 09 2010 02:10 PM (a8YWB)

6 Mongodb has some interesting tricks that solve some specific denormalisation problems I have with Minx.

I did look at Couchdb, but it doesn't really give me anything I need.

The simplest solution I can see that gives me everything I need would be Mongodb + Redis + Xapian + Memcached.  Which is kind of a mess and would require a non-OpenVZ server for MongoDB, but should at least work.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 09 2010 03:19 PM (+J3Nt)

7

It's an indication of just how fast and far computer science has grown that there are now such a wide variety of sub-specialties which are so different from one another that experts in them cannot converse intelligently.

When I was still able to work, my area of expertise was embedded software. I know nothing about databases. It's all greek to me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, August 09 2010 03:41 PM (+rSRq)

8 I should have said "Jeff Darcy considered Mongo seriously" because of course I am not competent to consider it seriously.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, August 10 2010 12:52 AM (/ppBw)

9 Maybe I should have said, "It's all geek to me."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, August 10 2010 01:49 AM (+rSRq)

10 Beware of geeks bearing .gifs?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wednesday, August 11 2010 12:53 PM (pWQz4)

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