[NBLUG/talk] Blade Servers

[Dustin Mollo]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 10:42:13AM -0600, Warren Raquel wrote:
> I have a friend needing to consildate rack servers. I'd like to know what
> people's favorite 1u and blade servers (Linux friendly, of course).

at my office, we currently use all dell servers, so we've got a few 1u boxes
of varying generations (1550, 1650...no 1750's yet.)  we're currently
looking at possibly moving to another vendor and have had meetings with ibm
and sun (sun is a current vendor of ours, ibm is not.)  ibm's x335 is a nice
looking box.  i personally have no intention of recommending we buy any of
sun's current batch of x86 boxes for numerous reasons i won't go into here
(that's another thread all together.)  at some point, i hear we're also
having a presenation from hp/compay/dec/whatever-they-call-themselves-today. 
i'm pretty confident we'll either just decide to stick with dell, or perhaps
choose ibm for either some or all of our future purchases.

as for blades, we currently have a dell blade solution installed.  it's not
bad, but certainly has room for improvement.  it's the 1655mc.  dell
recently stopped by our office and gave us a look ahead at their product
line - the next version of blades they are adding to their line are much
more in line with what i'd want in a blade solution.

ibm's bladecenter product is *hella* cool, imho.  when we originally had
wanted to look into blades, we were pretty much set on buying a rlx chassis. 
i'm happy to say we didn't.  it would have been a cabling nightmare.  had
ibm had their solution out a bit sooner and we had a bit more money to
spend, i'm pretty sure we would have gone with the ibm solution.

hth,

-dustin