[Tfug] Whats the biggest, most powerful/expensive system you have under your care?

[Bowie J. Poag]

Hey Tom! :)

Hey, I never claimed to have the biggest & baddest, but that's our 
group's current heavy-hitter. The guys in the Wintel group have a giant 
pile of Citrix servers, but they don't have anything, singularly, that 
matches it hardware-wise.

Whats interesting is, that setup I described is big and pricey not for 
it's ability to be a workhorse, but simply because it's built for speed. 
It's like 15% busy around the clock.. Like I said, it's a database 
server.. Really, only a trickle of data goes in and out of that thing. 
Its just that the trickle has to be hyper-fast, no matter what. Simple 
query or bizzarro query.

We have a server consolidation project happening soon, where a ton of 
gear is being replaced with a VMWare ESX server farm. I'd imagine that 
the ESX servers that we have coming in are going to be the new kings of 
the server room. Went to a VMWare dog and pony show in Phoenix a month 
ago. Wild stuff, that thar ESX.

Cheers,
Bowie



tponsford wrote:

>Bowie J. Poag wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Whats the biggest, most powerful/expensive system you have under your care?
>>
>>Currently, the biggest monster we have in production is a database 
>>server.. for a very, very big database. You're probably in it.  :)
>>
>>It's part of 2-node HACMP cluster. Each node in the cluster is a 4-way 
>>SMP RS/6000 box (8-way logical w/ AIX 5.3, yaaay) w/ 12GB RAM, dual 2Gb 
>>FibreChannel HBAs connected up to not one but two Sharks (Big f'ing 
>>piles of massively redundant high-speed storage, about 10TB total).. 
>>Virtualized, multipathed, and fully redundant front to back, top to 
>>bottom. It's about a $1.1-1.3 million setup, not including support 
>>agreements and whatnot.
>>
>>..We feed it small children every morning. Keeps the gears lubricated. :)
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Bowie
>>
>> 
>>
>>    
>>
>Well, for a while, not too long ago, I had root/administrator privileges
>while our contracting company was installing some geo-spatial software
>for a special DOD/Ministry of Homeland Security project here in SE
>Arizona.
>
>The system was a cluster of 6-8 Sunfire EK25K Servers maxed out to
>approximately 570 total processors with about 6-8 TB of main memory
>running Sol 10!.
>
>I wasn't told how much storage was, but suffice to say it was 10's of
>Terabytes (probably over 100)and was being upgraded to include more.
>The tape backup library was the largest I've ever seen.
>
>The system, I was told, was valued at around 45 million!!!!
>
>These systems were killer! (literally! One fell of a loading dock in
>Maryland and crushed some unlucky soul)
>
>It not only had Bowie's info, but I made a point to flag it :-)
>
>P.S> I was told there were even larger systems in the works in the area.
>
>Be afraid, be really afraid!!!
>
>
>Cheers
>
>Tom P.
>
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