So my company is looking at only using dell or hp for our
hadoop cluster and a sun thumper to backup the data. The prices are
ok, after a 40% discount, but realistically I am paying twice as much
as if I went to silicon mechanics, and with a much slower machine. It
seems as though the big expense are the disks. Even with a 40%
discount 550$ per 1tb disk seems crazy expensive. Also, they are
pushing me to build a smaller cluster (6 nodes) and I am pushing back
for nodes half the size but having twice as many. So how much of a
performance difference can I expect btwn 12 nodes with 1 xeon 5 series
running at 2.26 ghz 8 gigs of ram with 4 1 tb disks and a 6 node
cluster with 2 xeon 5 series running at 2.26 16 gigs of ram with 8 1
tb disks. Both setups will also have 2 very small sata drives in raid
1 for the OS. I will be doing some stuff with hadoop and a lot of
stuff with HBase. What are the considerations with HDFS performance
with a low number of nodes,etc.
