[eX-bulk] : Re: Rasberry pi - high density

Thu May 14 18:28:41 UTC 2015

On 2015-05-13 19:42, nanog at cdl.asgaard.org wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Do we really need them to be swappable at that point?  The reason we
> swap HDD's (if we do) is because they are rotational, and mechanical
> things break.

Right.

> Do we swap CPUs and memory hot?

Nope. Usually just toss the whole thing. Well I keep spare ram around 
cause it's so cheap. But if CPU goes, chuck it in the ewaste pile in the 
back.

  Do we even replace
> memory on a server that's gone bad, or just pull the whole thing
> during the periodic "dead body collection" and replace it?

Usually swap memory. But yeah, often times the hardware ops folks just 
cull old boxes on a quarterly basis and backfill with the latest batch 
of inbound kit. At large scale (which many on this list operate at), you 
have pallets of gear sitting in the to deploy queue, and another couple 
pallets worth racked up but not even imaged yet.

(This is all supposition of course. I'm used to working with $HUNDREDS 
of racks worth of gear). Containers, moonshot type things etc are 
certainly on the radar.

  Might it
> not be more efficient (and space saving) to just add 20% more storage
> to a server than the design goal, and let the software use the extra
> space to keep running when an SSD fails?

Yes. Also a few months ago I read an article about several SSD brands 
having $MANY terabytes written to them. Can't find it just now. But they 
seem to take quite a long time (data wise/number of write wise) to fail.

   When the overall storage
> falls below tolerance, the unit is dead.  I think we will soon need to
> (if we aren't already) stop thinking about individual components as
> FRUs.  The server (or rack, or container) is the FRU.
> 
> Christopher

Yes. Agree.

Most of the very large scale shops (the ones I've worked at) are 
massively horizontal scaled, cookie cutter. Many boxes 
replicating/extending/expanding a set of well defined workloads.