Release the beast! Xeon X5650 + RAID 0 Intel 710 SSD (2)

Well… not really a beast in today’s standards… but it’s a beast if we’re talking about processor blades for a 10-blade Supermicro enclosure. Supermicro released its Sandy Bridge Xeons but those are available for a 14-blade enclosure for now.

I wrote a post before about our test bed machine to figure out if SSD is a good route for us. We concluded that it is so we opted to go with the enterprise offerings of Intel, the 710 series.

The Intel 710 SSD is really not inexpensive. I decided to go with RAID 0 of 2 Intel 710 200GB because of 2 reasons: (1) to increase space & (2) to distribute writes for (much) longer write endurance.

Technical specs:

• Supermicro SBI-7126T-S6
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x Intel 710 200G SSD (RAID0)
• 8 x 8 GB DDR3

The X5650 is a 6-core CPU but because of Hyper-threading, it’s registering as 12 cores.

The new blade was deployed as a ganeti node in one of our production clusters. So far, the 2 Xeon X5650s are doing well even with 8 CPU-hungry virtual machines.

I configured the server with growth in mind, thus the 64G memory. We’re not using that much RAM right now but that will change quickly once the ganeti node will host DB servers.

I was planning to perform some benchmarks once we deployed it but I haven’t got the chance… Hopefully, I’ll have the time when the next one arrives.

About these ads