'Cloud' chassis - anyone using them?

[MartinD]

Many moons ago, I used to work for a company that used some of these when they were first coming out. They were part of a fallover system for high-traffic, HA campaigns (like TV advertisments, etc) and they worked quite well. I'm seeing more of these coming out of the woodwork on the likes of eBay and specifically, newer versions with a lot of nodes crammed in to the one chassis.

So I'm wondering if any of our providers here are using them and if so, why? For the most part, the only real reason I can think of is space saving - cramming 16 nodes in to an 8-10U chassis would make sense if you're trying to keep your physical footprint low but aside from that.. what benefits are there?

 

[Francisco]

You mean the supermicro twin's or microcloud's?

The Dell 6100's are super popular even though they're buggy/kinda junkie.

Francisco

 

[HalfEatenPie]

I have never used one.

But I want one.

I want one so badly.

 

[MartinD]

You mean the supermicro twin's or microcloud's?

All of the above, really.

 

[drmike]

All of these are junkie  when looking at things solely from VPS world where smart folks bundle a stack of drives per server.  Most of these top out at  around 3 drives per actual server.

Soooooooooo..... if using these and liking redundant drives then need fast backplane connector to something out of chassis.

Benefits of these had been, when you could get a good deal you could light up say 4 new nodes today.  Good for computational nodes or use where disk isn't getting beat to death.

It's density per U play.  Still valid really.   Clouds are the gig still and redundant portable front sides.  Bump me from one node that is overloaded to another or to another for redundancy same location.

These are all nice but vendor buy in with these, less self serviceable if at all.  High price point per unit in some ways.  

But, if you look hard and long, price can be quite right with these used side.  

 

[Serveo]

Been looking at these setups for a while. If space is your bottleneck its a good buy, but as long as it isn't don't bother. We use Supermicro only, not even looked a Dell or HP. We know what we get and the microcloud looks neat but TCO is still higher then simple SM plug and play boxes with some centralized storage Jbods.

 

[datarealm]

We use SuperMicro microcloud for our cloud nodes.  As you mentioned the main reason is space savings.  They are also fairly easy to work with and cuts down on power cords/management.

 

[rmlhhd]

Online.net uses the Supermicro Microclouds for their Dedibox XC servers which in my mind are great. http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc


I know a small ISP that uses some of the HP ones, I've had some first hand experience with these and they're awesome especially with Proxmox and the HP ILO management interface is just amazing.


Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure Delimiter use the HP ones for their cheap dedis.

 

[MartinD]

I hadn't thought about the cabling aspect right enough.