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Marcus,

Blade servers generally can and should be purchased with 2 disks for mirrored OS, SWAP and some binaries. Given that the smallest disk you can get now exceeds your DAS requirement by 8X plus I’d say they all get local DAS. This would allow you a single set of spares, cookie cutter software installation, etc… Also, I don’t think a typical Win2000 system can easily boot without a disk

I’m not aware of any blade servers having single or dual fibre channel out of the back of each blade so DAS on the filer is out of the question. The HP Proliant BL 10e has Gbit out of the back with a Gbit consolidation switch built in to cut way down on the cable mess.

With regard to your data storage – everything should go onto the filer(s) for all the obvious reasons. Even the sources for the images that will go on the local DAS. You don’t want to manage N file and OS spaces on N blades. One place to back up, no blade server is different from the rest, the world scales easily…. Free time to do something interesting.

Good luck,

Hunter M. Wylie

21193 French Prairie Rd

Suite 100

St. Paul, Oregon 97137-9722

Bus: 866-367-8900

FAX: 503-633-8901

Cell: 503-880-1947

http://www.itmls.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Bui, Marcus
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2003 9:11 AM
To: 'toasters@mathworks.com'
Subject: blade servers to Filer

Hi Toasters,

We are migrating many of the current servers to HP blade servers. The Server Team is considering connecting to the Filers/SAN on the back end for storage. I know this is not a problem. Some of the applications servers only need 4GB of space so leaving it on the DAS will be better. Want to best utilize the Filers since not every blade server is a good candidate for NAS if DAS will suffice. What are some criteria to use when considering connecting blade servers to the Filers? Any suggestion is appreciated.

cheers,

Marcus Bui