[clug] Interesting article

[Alex Satrapa]

On 05/01/2009, at 22:39 , Sam Couter wrote:

> Commodity gear is cheap. Managing said gear is not, neither is power  
> and
> data centre space. It's much easier (cheaper) to manage fewer powerful
> blade servers or massive virtual servers than piles of rinky-dink
> commodity gear.

I disagree - with blade servers you're no longer just upgrading one  
unit at a time. If the manufacturer stops shipping the backplane, or  
starts selling blades that are only compatible with the new backplane,  
you suddenly have to upgrade the whole server farm - not because it's  
broken, but because you wanted to add one more blade!

It's the same story as I've experienced with simply maintaining old  
computers - suddenly you just can't buy an AMD K6-II for love or  
money. So you have to upgrade your motherboard too, which also means  
upgrading your RAM. Oh - and noone makes PCI video cards anymore, so  
you have to replace your old faithful with an AGP, or PCI-X or PCI-E  
or whatever is in flavour this year.

Now it's just on a bigger scale - we're not talking components of  
individual computers, we're talking entire racks full of blade  
processors. I'd prefer to be replacing a steady stream of rinky-dink  
commodity hardware in small, barely perceptible progression, than a  
complete rack of blades which by its nature will require some highly  
visible downtime.

Alex