One other data point here - you may find that some vendors will supply
servers using "enterprise" drives rather than "consumer" drives (see
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=503 versus
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576 for an example).
You'll find the enterprise drives are generally more expensive and don't
follow the same price drop curve as the consumer drives. I can't
definitively say whether the enterprise drives are worth the extra spend
- the vendors will tell you that the consumer class drives aren't
designed/manufactured to run 24x7 like the enterprise drives (apparently
the enterprise drives are designed to be more vibration resistant also,
which is a feature aimed at the situation where you have large numbers
of these drives in RAID arrays).
In some unscientific performance comparisons between drives, I have
found the RE3s to have "better" performance than the consumer WDC green
drives (but a more rigorous comparison from someone would be most welcome).
-stephen
Ted Dunning wrote:
2TB drives are just now dropping to parity with 1TB on a $/GB basis.
If you want space rather than speed, this is a good option. If you want
speed rather than space, more spindles and smaller disks are better.
Ironically, 500GB drives now often cost more than 1TB drives (that is $, not
$/GB).
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Patrick Angeles
<patrickange...@gmail.com>wrote:
We went with 2 x Nehalems, 4 x 1TB drives and 24GB RAM. The ram might be
overkill... but it's DDR3 so you get either 12 or 24GB. Each box has 16
virtual cores so 12GB might not have been enough. These boxes are around
$4k
each, but can easily outperform any $1K box dollar per dollar (and
performance per watt).
If you're extremely I/O bound, you can get single-socket configurations
with
the same amount of drive spindles for really cheap (~$2k for single proc,
8-12GB RAM, 4x1TB drives).
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:19 AM, stephen mulcahy
<stephen.mulc...@deri.org>wrote:
Todd Lipcon wrote:
Most people building new clusters at this point seem to be leaning
towards
dual quad core Nehalem with 4x1TB 7200RPM SATA and at least 8G RAM.
We went with a similar configuration for a recently purchased cluster but
opted for qual quad core Opterons (Shanghai) rather than Nehalems and
invested the difference in more memory per node (16GB). Nehalem seem to
perform very well on some benchmarks but that performance comes at a
premium. I guess it depends on your planned use of the cluster but in a
lot
of cases more memory may be better spent, especially if you plan on
running
things like HBase on the cluster also (which we do).
-stephen
--
Stephen Mulcahy, DI2, Digital Enterprise Research Institute,
NUI Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland
http://di2.deri.ie http://webstar.deri.ie http://sindice.com
--
Stephen Mulcahy, DI2, Digital Enterprise Research Institute,
NUI Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland
http://di2.deri.ie http://webstar.deri.ie http://sindice.com
