

Ask HN: Diskless or Diskful - dedalus

Consider an architecture where you have 10 boxes per cluster. Its enough for me to have 2 diskful boxes that distribute the os images through netboot, make other boxes log remotely to these boxes. In essence I would save cost($200 per box) by going diskless than have disks.. What are your thoughts on running a node with every box haveing its own disk versus only a few master boxes having the disk...
======
CyberFonic
I have several disk-less clusters. They work very well for multiple test
environments. I have a bunch of older boxen with only 100Mbit eNet and the
file servers use gigE. My configuration uses bootp & PxE. For even better
performance you may want to look at iSCSI, FCoE or ATA over Ethernet (AoE) I
prefer the later two as they run at Layer 2 not 3 and thus are better for data
center deployment.

It's not just the cost saving on disks. You get reduced power consumption and
less noise. You could also look at using CompactFlash cards with a CF-to-IDE
adaptor, it's excellent for read-mostly system disk.

~~~
dedalus
thank you.

------
dryicerx
Diskless is great if your base OS image is constantly being modified/tweaked
like crazy, and you wouldn't be able to accomplish the same thing by running a
shell script at boot that was pulled remotely (each node having a standard
shell).

The downside of going diskless is you are trading off valuable memory for the
ramdisk. Memory/$ > hdd/$.

Have you considered just getting cheap/small hard disks for each node, and
having a central shell script that runs on all of them on boot to bring them
up to task?

~~~
dedalus
Cool. The other reason I was considering this was because the network
throughput is better than the disk throughput this making my I/O faster..

