[General] GAP Inc (gapinc.com / gap.com) moves from windows to linux

[Majed B.]

I was actually looking at from the total CPU powerhorse available, but
you do have a valid point in that some are used for Disaster Recovery,
but I don't think they have standby machine just sitting idle; it
would make more sense to run them in parallel to do load balancing.

Blades are convenient if you want to build a clustering environment,
since the internal fabric of the Blade Chassis allows communication
between the servers, separate from the external network communication.
Also, because the blade servers are relatively small, you can't
squeeze a lot of RAM into it, so this pushes you to do load balancing
and failover scenarios between blades servers and between multiple
blade chassis.

With the assumption of having 1000 blade servers, let's assume that
300 of them are for the web portal. Also, assume a minimum CPU clock
of 2GHz. The total CPU power is 600 GHz!!!
NBK's online portal serves Kuwait only (I checked Egypt, Lebanon &
UAE, and none have a portal). So one would think that there's a huge
amount of CPU power being wasted somewhere!

Virtualization is a good solution to consolidate hardware, but
shouldn't be done always. Some applications benefit from it while
others suffer a lot of performance hit. I don't know if the current
vmware suppliers and implementers actually do the benchmarking for
customers to see if it's worth virtualizing their servers.

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Burhan Khalid<burhan.khalid at gmail.com> wrote:
> You have to keep in mind that banks have to deal with outside regulatory
> requirements so their blades are also split into DR sites, replication,
> hot-swaps, etc.
>
> A lot of times, for security reasons, they don't let computers run more than
> one service at one time; so most of the time the reason they are going for
> blades is for power/cooling/density reasons; not actually because they are
> utilizing the server completely.
>
> For example -- they normally don't run two 'core' services on the same
> physical machine. So, you would rarely see the BDC and lets say print
> services running on the same physical machine.
>
> This is also the reason why virtualization is such a hot topic because it
> allows for isolation of machines on the same physical host; alleviating (to
> some extent) the problem that one vulnerability brings down the two
> services.
>
> 1000 blades is nothing:
>
> 16 blades per chassis = 72 chassis, each is 9U high so that means you can
> fit all that into 16 42U cabinets.
>
> Compare that with average 2U server, and 1000 servers will fit in 48
> cabinets.
>
> 48 vs. 16, just on space -- not to mention cooling and cabling, etc.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Burhan

-- 
       Majed B.