Sometimes our blade ambassadors pass questions and ideas around our virtual watercooler. Today's most interesting one was:
"If you were asked to give a basic spec with a BladeSystem for a large cloud-type, general-purpose computing platform using VMware (up to 100 chassis) for a large corporation, how would you build it and why?"
The question was pretty broad and for a real cloud implementation, we'd defer to the really cool work going on in HP labs on cloud computing. But but here were some of initial thoughts that came back.
1. Multiple workloads such as VMs are often host memory bound. Therefore, the bigger the memory the better. The ProLiant BL495c is especially well suited to this task with multi-core procs and huge memory capacity. 2. What about the network connections? When used in combination with Virtual Connect Flex-10, throughput is extremely high (10Gb per LOM), very configurable, flexible without a bunch of coordination, and you’ll realize 4 to 1 consolidation of the network equipment. Add Virtual Connect-FC and some shared HP SAN storage and you'd add more flexiblity and cut about half of the fibre channel equipment costs. 3. Bring it all together with Insight Dynamics and you get a smart capacity planner and orchestrator layer for both the vm's and the apps on physical servers.
These three alone would be a great start cloud-starter kit that any business would envy.
Tell us how you'd do it.
Posted
02-01-2009 5:13 AM
by
newtonja