Your naivete when it comes to the innards of a super server like the p690 is breathtaking.
Posted on 09/26/2002 9:29:02 PM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Applera Corp., one of Hewlett Packard Co.'s showcase clients, has decided to retool its IT infrastructure, upgrading and consolidating its server infrastructure and networked storage by swapping out all its Compaq equipment for IBM servers and EMC storage. The deal, likely worth tens of millions of dollars, involves more than 150TB of EMC high-end storage and a dozen of IBM's high-end P-series servers configured in a super computer cluster.
Mark Lewis, who took over as EMC Corp.'s chief technology officer in July after resigning as vice president and general manager of Compaq's Enterprise Storage Group, led the development of Compaq's StorageWorks product line, which was a large part of Celera Genomic Group's technology install base. Compaq merged earlier this year with HP.
Norwalk, Conn.-based Applera is the parent company of Rockville, Md.-based Celera Genomics and Foster City, Calif.-based Applied Biosystems Group.
Lewis declined to talk about the terms of the deal, but did call it a "critical win" for EMC.
"We think this is a very strong growth industry in general, and want to apply our technology to it," Lewis said. "In this industry, I'd say this is one of the largest single deals done ... especially in terms of capacity."
Mark Gonzalez, vice president of storage sales for HP's U.S. operations, said the company would have had to give away its hardware to keep the Applera contract, an account HP doesn't need with its already strong biotechnology base.
"It really did boil down to having a conversation that says, 'Hey, do you want to give us the gear to stay here?' " Gonzalez said. "We've been there and done that and have a bunch of other accounts where we continue to be successful, and we just weren't willing to give away the hardware to keep the account."
"I can't relate to that comment at all. I don't know what it means," said Paul Fingerman, vice president for applications delivery and chief architect at Applera.
Fingerman did say, however, that the decision to go with IBM and EMC was "value based."
Applera purchased 12 IBM p690 Regatta servers running on AIX. IBM Global Services will provide support services to migrate Applera's data center at Celera Genomics' headquarters in Rockville, Md., including all research and line-of-business applications, to the platform.
Applera's Celera Genomics Group and Applied Biosystems Group will be using IBM products and services for support of therapeutic drug discovery research and online life sciences applications.
"I think what was important was that there's a substantial track record of EMC working with IBM and with the P-series technology in particular, so that we were not on untrod ground integrating those two product lines," Fingerman said.
Celera Genomics is expected to use the systems in its research and development operations to identify and validate potential drug targets and diagnostic marker candidates based on proteomics, bioinformatics and genomic data.
Celera Genomics and Applied Biosystems already had some of its storage on a storage-area network built on Compaq StorageWorks arrays. But it will be building a much larger infrastructure, where the SAN will encompass virtually all of the storage.
The company purchased three EMC high-end Symmetrics arrays and 5TB of storage on EMC's Clariion CX600 midrange arrays. The SAN will centralize management of data for hundreds of applications, including genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, medicinal chemistry and databases from Oracle running in a high-performance Unix computing environment.
The EMC network-attached Celera file servers will manage the companies' Windows 2000 and Windows NT-based file sharing and home directories.
IBM will contribute to the IT overhaul by providing a supercomputer cluster consisting of 12 IBM eServer p690 servers running AIX to replace existing Alpha servers from the former Compaq Computer Corp.
The multiyear IBM contract was signed by Applera Corp. on behalf of Celera and Applied Biosystems. Both companies will jointly use the server cluster.
The machines will each include 32 IBM 1.3-GHz Power4 processors and 64GB of RAM, and are being linked together in a cluster using a high-speed colony switch from IBM, said Peter Ungaro, IBM's vice president of high-performance computing. The cluster will be used for database applications, file serving and as computational servers for complex research and development work done by the companies in drug research and life sciences.
The cluster, which will be installed at Celera's Rockville, Md., data center, will also be used by Applied Biosystems for e-business functions for its online medical and biological information databases.
The price of the contract isn't being released, but each of the p690 servers lists for about $2 million, for a total of at least $24 million, plus services and support from IBM Global Services.
Under the deal, IBM's Life Sciences group will also work with the three companies on potential research and development collaborations in the life sciences field.
The supercomputing infrastructure will also support Applied Biosystems' Knowledge Business, which includes the exclusive marketing of the Celera DiscoverySystem Online Platform, an integrated source of the human genome and other biological and medical data.
At the same time though, HP's idiocy regarding their Unix server direction is what is killing them.
I wonder how many weeks it would take Windows to defrag it, though.
okay. so far, you've invested 150 bucks in this project.
next, buy 8 180 gb maxtor drives at, oh say, 250 bucks apiece. yow. that's a bite: $2,000, or there abouts.
oh. i'm sorry. i just did your 2 mil system for $2,150?!?
oops. oh. that's right ... yours is SO much faster.
yeah. right.
Your naivete when it comes to the innards of a super server like the p690 is breathtaking.
maxtor HDs??? eeewwwhhh. there must be some good quality ones out there then, (although i've never seen them) because between maxtors and quantum fireballs, there's more frying going on than the local greasy spoon
i'll stick with WD and IBM.
Can you stripe 8 drives on an IDE controller?
HP has a problem, in that they have their PA-RISC CPUs, but with Compaq, they also have to support Alpha, at least for a little while.
HPUX and Tru64 (the OS for the Alpha chip) are very different from each other, and HP has done nothing to address the customer's questions about what they are going to do in the future. Meanwhile IBM only has one Unix, AIX, that runs on everything from desktop boxes to huge servers like the SP2 etc.
no. exact configuration depends on the maker. for example, the highpoint raid controller will allow up to four disks in the array: two as stripes, and an additional two working as mirrors thereof (a so-called raid 0+1 array). the promise only allows 2 disks in either a stripe or mirror array, although you can add another disk as a spare to take over should one fail.
to add 8 disks, one has to hook two up as a master and slave on each of the four ide channels available (and thereby forego any raid array).
a couple of other posters chided me for not understanding the differences between my approach, and that discussed in the article. to them i would say: "i am perfectly aware of the technological differences."
just as i am aware of the differences between my beater mercury, and a ferrari. however, i am also aware of their similarities, and i would propose that they have substantially more in common than they do differences.
p.s. anyone who says that ibm makes a quality harddrive has absolutely no clue about what the cognescenti are saying, e.g. http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/2799/. similar threads and lamentations can be found easily everywhere on the net, i.e., storage review, slashdot, sharky's, ace, you name . even znet retracted their initial recommendation of the ibm deathstars.
me? oh, i only had three out of six fail (utterly, catastrophically) within the first three months. ibm harddrives quality? balderdash.
IBM deep-sixed their PC AIX a long, long time ago, BTW. The lowest-end box AIX will run on is a crappy PowerPC.
I got to play around with AIX on a microchannel 386 a long time ago and it was cool. I wish they still supported it.
Yes you can.
Forget the Promise and HighPoint Tech cards; those guys are cheap-O clever hacks that do a decent job with using IDE/ATA chips and busy drivers to fool the OS into thinking you have RAID.
People who want mission-critical IDE RAID use the cards by 3Ware.
These guys have 2, 4, 8, and 12-drive IDE RAID solutions that do all the cheap-O 0,1,0+1,JBOD solutions, plus implement real RAID-5 (parity and striping) in hardware.
I was recently offered a job where one of the perquisites they mentioned was being able to help set up a 1.2 TB server (10 120-GB drives on a 12-drive controller, with one parity drive and one hot-spare)...funny how they knew that would cause the pavlovian salivation :-)
In my experience the drives IBM makes in the Thailand facility are excellent. I've had 8 of them and all of them have performed flawlessly. It's the ones from Czechoslovakia that seem to fail like clock-work, in my observation.
But it is a moot point, since they are selling their HD business unit to Hitachi.
but the real question is: "how many millions (each) did your solution cost?"
you didn't install deathstars, did you?
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