DoC Private Cloud: Commodity Storage Servers

CSG are investigating the hardware that could be used to realise the DoC cloud. This page describes various commodity hardware options for storage nodes.

We have considered a number of manufacturers for compute nodes including IBM, Dell and HP.=== Storage Nodes === Under this category, we require servers with many disk-slots. We chose a 2.5in disk form-factor over a 3.5in one since we prefer more spindles rather than raw capacity. In addition, RAID re-build speeds will be faster with smaller-capacity 2.5in disks. The current maximum capacity of Enterprise 2.5in drives, however, is 1TB.

We considered HP, Dell, IBM and Oracle (Sun).

HP

HP ProLiant DL380p Gen 8 Server Quote from ProLinx (ICT's server supplier): £10,208.00.

• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 2.00GHz, eight-core CPUs.
• Sixteen 2.5in drive-bay slots (populated with 1TB SAS 7200RPM hard-disks).
• 64GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz ECC RAM.

Dell

Dell PowerEdge R720xd Quote from Dell: £7,173.99.

• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2640 six-core 2.5Ghz CPUs
• Twenty-four 2.5in drive-bay slots (populated with 1TB SAS 7200RPM hard-disks).
• Two rear 2.5in drive-bay slots (populated with 146GB SAS 15000RPM hard-disks).
• 64GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz ECC RAM.
• 2 x 10GbE NICs.

Alternatively, it costs £5,965.00 for the same configuration with twelve 3.5in drive-bay slots populated with 2TB SAS 7200RPM hard-disks.

IBM

IBM System x3650 M4 Quote from QAssociates: £10,188.70.

• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2640 six-core 2.5Ghz CPUs.
• fourteen 2.5in 1TB SAS 7200RPM hard-disks.
• two 146GB SAS 15000RPM hard-disks.
• 64GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz ECC RAM.
• 2 x 10GbE NICs.

SUN/ORACLE

Sun Fire X4270 M3 Server No quote; known to be quite expensive. Can be configured like the Dell PowerEdge R720xd.