Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 22:29 -0500, Paul Bennett wrote: > On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:40:25 -0500, Linux GNUbie <gnubie at gmail.com> wrote: > > There are so many things that the word "best" can mean. Have you looked at > the Configuration & Options Guide? Last time I saw it, there was a lot of > good information in the beginning for the target market of each server. > > It's at http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/xseries/library/configtools.html Thanks for this link. It will help me a lot to identify which product will fit on our needs. > It looks like the x345 has been withdrawn in favor of the 346, too. You > may be able to get the x345 from business partners or resellers, but not > directly from IBM. Yeah. > I can't speak for their stability in real terms. What I can say is that > they're really designed to be replaced on a whole-machine basis (and then > repaired and sold as pre-owned) as opposed to ordinary xSeries which are > designed to be replaced part-by-part. If you own (say) 500 Blades, it can > be a huge economic advantage. Ok. > The whole xSeries range are great to work with. I can't recommend them > highly enough. Yeah. > Hm. A Bladecenter holds 14 blades. Depending on your needs, that's only 6 > slots used on CPU, but you're only allowed one SCSI expansion unit per CPU > blade, for a total of 12 SCSI hard drives. > > Six x346s will be 12U of rack space (instead of 7) but will support 36 > SCSI hard drives (instead of 12). > > For NFS, I'd say the choice of x346 is clear, with each unit capable of > 880GB instead of the 290GB max for a SCSI Blade. If you've got 12U > available, I say go for it. Also, you might want to recommend using x336s > for the non-NFS servers, where storage is less of an issue. You'll save > money, power and space. It seems to me that the xSeries servers is the most practical choice compared to blades. The only advantage that I see with blades is it will eat less of space in the server room. Thanks again. GNUbie