disadvantages of linux cluster - admin

[alvin at Maggie.Linux-Consulting.com]

hi all

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, M A Suzen wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Disadvantage of such a distributed environment would be administrative and 
> maintaince cost as you said, apart from communication interconnect. 
> (assuming that we are comparing PC-cluster with SGI-multiproc machine)

administrative and maintenance of the servers can and should be automated
thus reducing the costs to almost zero people time

people is needed to maintain and fix problems or potential problems
of upgrades and changes ... these are done on a local test cluster
that can be wiped out and nobody would care  if there was a major bug
in the released code
	- a cluster of 486 or pentium-200Mhz is plenty fast enough
	to test the new patches/fixes before releasing to the world

- one person should be able to maintain 100-200 servers ... within an 8hr
  period .... ( to hit reset if needed and boot it properly )

	- system and user data can be 100% automated ...
	( just need someone to test it before hand )

	- if its truely automated properly, baby sitting 500machines or
	100 machines wont matter much ... 

- there is the initial hurdle of baby sitting 1pc at home vs
  10 pc in the office  and 20 pcs in the office...after that 100 or more
  wont matter as its being automated along the way...
	- debian, redhat, suse makes distro maintainance a no-brainer if
	its done right and if you trust them  ( i dont trust um )
	so i have my own scripts that does the same for files i care about

-- keeping user data in sync between machines in the cluster is little
   trickier ... ( use your favorite method ?? -- muti-home, mirroring,
   copying, nfs'ing )

c ya
alvin

-- think google .. they have 10,000 machines... and at 5,000 servers,
   they still had 5-10 people maintainting 5,000 servers