[Beowulf] Re: GPU boards and cluster servers.

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 06:41:01PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:

>> You don't have your own spares kit? For big clusters like yours, it
>> doesn't cost much.
>
> could be we don't know how to ask; I'm not aware of HP actually offering 
> such a kit.  or how much we'd be willing to pay.

Well, I always buy a couple of extra nodes, and of course some extra
disks. That way most failures have spares at hand, and then you can
on-site or depot repair at your leisure.

For the less common failures it costs more to have parts, but for my
current business I have an extra of everything: switches, routers,
PDUs, yadda yadda, at each of my sites. (Anyone else notice that
tribe.net was down for days 'waiting for a spare part'? Must have
been something they couldn't get at Fry's...)

-- greg