Our New Scale Cluster Arrives Tomorrow
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Nice.
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When can we play?
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Oooh shiny. Are those Dell servers under the hood?
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@coliver said:
Oooh shiny. Are those Dell servers under the hood?
Yse, Scale uses Dell under the hood.
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@art_of_shred said:
What are those WD's sitting in? Is that a spare HDD rack thingy?
Also I can't read the label but I'll bet you anything those are WD80's, 120's, 160's, 320's. Most likely 80/160, SATA1 with dual power options (MOLEX and SATA).
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Those are 4 Dell servers from X-Byte.
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The Scale cluster here in this particular case are brand new R430 nodes under the hood.
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It's only now I realize I should have included some bogus marketing material without telling you.
Oh the possibilities...
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@JeffReady said:
It's only now I realize I should have included some bogus marketing material without telling you.
Oh the possibilities...
Yup, you missed a lot of screen shot chances there
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Getting lots of VMs built out as we get the cluster up and ready for large scale lab usage.
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Live Migrations working as we keep using the system even while the nodes update themselves.
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So what's Scale using? I assume the hardware is all dell boxes? I assume there is a VSAN? What hypervisor are they using?
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@anonymous said:
So what's Scale using? I assume the hardware is all dell boxes? I assume there is a VSAN? What hypervisor are they using?
KVM.
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@anonymous said:
So what's Scale using? I assume the hardware is all dell boxes? I assume there is a VSAN? What hypervisor are they using?
Not VSAN, this is a bit more advanced than that. It is a RAIN storage cluster using proprietary block mirroring. So no need for SAN links between nodes, the storage talks over 10GigE backplane directly node to node to handle storage replication. The VMs are on a local filesystem, not a remote one.
Hypervisor is KVM.
Hardware is all Dell. This is the newest hardware yet, so no one has it but us, it is R430 nodes.
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@scottalanmiller Could I build something like this myself?
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller Could I build something like this myself?
Well, kind of. Scale is unique in that the storage layer is fully integrated with KVM, so that is not something that you could do yourself. But, in theory, you could use technologies like Gluster or CEPH to replicate some of the behaviour. You could use KVM or Xen on top of that. You would be lacking their "no master interface" front end, but that you can do without.
So from a "all local storage cluster" perspective, yes you could build your own hyperconverged solution for sure. It would be a different storage implementation than Scale's but you can still do RAIN. What you will lack is the automatic node ability to just add and subtract nodes, but you can do that manually and how often do you add nodes?
What makes the Scale special is the full stack testing and support. The whole thing is built and tested as a unit. All firmware is heavily tested, right down to the drive models. It's pretty extreme - which is why they only offer three models.
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@scottalanmiller I assume there mega expensive?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@anonymous said:
So what's Scale using? I assume the hardware is all dell boxes? I assume there is a VSAN? What hypervisor are they using?
Not VSAN, this is a bit more advanced than that. It is a RAIN storage cluster using proprietary block mirroring. So no need for SAN links between nodes, the storage talks over 10GigE backplane directly node to node to handle storage replication. The VMs are on a local filesystem, not a remote one.
Hypervisor is KVM.
Hardware is all Dell. This is the newest hardware yet, so no one has it but us, it is R430 nodes.
I'm assuming it's proprietary? A shared backplane between three + hosts and 2 plus sets of disk? Is it, or is it not using a 10 GbE switch (or two) to connect all of the equipment?
AKA could someone buy off the shelf Dell equipment and replicate this?
