AMD Opteron servers: just in time for EclipseCon!
Just in time for EclipseCon, AMD is donating five Opteron-powered servers to the Eclipse Foundation. How rockin’ is that? Here are the specs:
- Dual CPU, Quad-core Opteron 64 processors
- 8GB RAM
- 2x 320GB SATA disks
- Tyan motherboard with all the goodies
- 2u server chassis can fit 8 disks
These machines will just shred through whatever we toss at them, so we must put them to good use. Such powerful machines open up so many possibilities!
One unit will be shipped to EclipseCon, so you can see the beast up close. After that it will be used to house a huge MySQL database and BIRT-based reporting application for the Usage Data Collector, which can potentially add zillions of rows per month. Number-crunching power will be crucial here.
The other four units will likely power Bugzilla and our website, www.eclipse.org, specifically. Both these heavyweight sites are currently served from our 5-node cluster, and putting them on dedicated hardware will not only speed them up, but it will also remove substantial load from the cluster itself.
I always want at least two servers for each site for fault tolerance, but chances are that’s too much power — and I certainly don’t want those quad-cores sitting idle. Therefore, Matt, Karl and I have discussed using Xen’s virtualization engine to create virtual servers instead, allowing us to split one server into, say, 2 or 3 vservers. Latest Xen code supports the AMD-V — hardware virtualization acceleration — so the vservers should perform just as well as their bare iron equivalents.
Come see me at EclipseCon and I’ll show you these great new machines. If you’ve never met me before, here’s a hint: I’ll be the guy wearing an AMD t-shirt and dancing around like a giddy school girl 
Posted February 8th, 2008 by Denis Roy in category: Uncategorized
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3 Responses to “AMD Opteron servers: just in time for EclipseCon!”
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Andrew Niefer Says:
February 8th, 2008 at 10:57 am
If you’re at a loss, you could always donate one to Kim
Gunnar Says:
February 8th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Oh man, you must be happy now! Phew, looks like a looooot beer each evening.
We recently opened our second data center. This time in Frankfurt. We deployed a Sun Blade center there and virtualization is great. If you think about Xen you should also look at Ganeti. I have it deployed locally here.
See you at EclipseCon!!!
Denis Roy Says:
February 8th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Yeah, I’m sure Kim would like one of these puppies.
Ganeti, eh? Looks cool, I will have a look. We already have a dozen Xen-based vservers for projects, so this could be interesting. Thanks for the tip.
See you at EclipseCon!