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Re: Adding P4500 G2, Expand Cluster or Build New

 
Jeff Roback
Occasional Contributor

Adding P4500 G2, Expand Cluster or Build New

We have a cluster with two P4500's (5.4 TB units) and one P4500 G2 (7.2 TB).    We're going to be adding two more P4500 G2's (7.2 TB).     I know that performance reasons we'd be best off adding the new units to the cluster for five systems total, however, it seems like by doing that we'd be giving up quite a bit of space since the 7.2 TB units will only contribute 5.4TB to the cluster.

 

Does anyone have a feel for the performance difference of a 5 node unit compared to two clusters with two of the G1 P4500's and a second cluster with the three G2P4500's?     This will be used in an environment for VMWare virtualization.

 

Thanks,

Jeff

1 REPLY 1
Northwoods
Frequent Advisor

Re: Adding P4500 G2, Expand Cluster or Build New

Will one large cluster be faster? Yes for I/O. Take a look at your environment see if you are seeing a lot of performance issues related to disk I/O. I had a 6 nodes with 450GB drives and added 2 nodes with 600GB drives to make one large cluster. Is the disk I/O better yes, but it only lasted 6 months before I ran out of space.

 


Looking back I would say it depends. If you are planning on not buying any more matching nodes to the ones you just bought I would be inclined to have one cluster as with two clusters you still need to have that 10% reserve on each cluster. Then next time around look maybee at the midline version.

 

If you are planning on getting more nodes that are idential to the ones you just purchased, then I would look at building a new cluster.