12 avril 2009
ISILON IQ 6000i & actual models
We own a cluster of 5 IQ 6000i, that costed us more than 100 000$, and I would like to describe what is the hardware of each box (20 000$+).
- Server-grade Motherboard
- Pentium 4 Xeon CPU (actual model use Core2 Quad 8200 consumer-grade CPU)
- 4GB DDR RAM
- 12 SATA Hitachis Deskstart consumer-grade hard-drive.
All that for 20 000$+.
On the performance-level, the hard-drive may deliver 8 000Mb/s streaming, or 3600Mb/s with our 2MB random read (our payload is 2MB read at-once, not-so-randomly), and the box deliver 600Mb/s (1/6th) crashing at peak.
I won't say it's too expensive, I prefer to say that it doesn't deliver the expected performance level, at least 900Mb/s on 1x1Gb ethernet link, or 1800Mb/s (50% of practical hard-drive performances) on 2x1Gb Ethernet links.
It just doesn't deliver, at 20 000$+ per box
PS: Naturally our cluster use "infiniband" that is far from infinite bandwidth and is also a limiting factor, even with 5 boxes.