A Travel Rack Worth Looking At

A travel rack worth looking at...

Highlighting a number of innovations in server, storage and networking technology, this collection of equipment was designed from the ground up to provide a comprehensive platform to showcase all Bally Technologies systems and features in real world environments. 

Network

Like many enterprise minded technology companies, we have a long history of utilizing CISCO networking equipment in our infrastructure. We have been testing third party switching gear in our own lab environments and found that we can effectively integrate several with our existing infrastructure. An excellent example of that is the HP 5120 series of switches. The A5120, shown above, is a feature rich very capable device that allows for layer 3 interfacing directly into our CISCO core switching and with all the power to assume the role of a core switch in its own right.

Servers and Storage

At the heart of the system we have the HP c7000 Chassis and 8 ProLiant BL 465c Gen 8 blade servers. The blade chassis gives us the density we need in compute resources in a relatively small footprint that still allows for growth if we require it down the road. Each blade provides 16 physical CPU cores in AMD’s outstanding Opteron 6212 flavor that hits a perfect bang for buck sweet spot for virtualizing on the scale we intended to here. Each blade also provides 128 GB of RAM giving us close to a terabyte of memory.  The chassis also contains 4 HP chassis 10G capable switching modules and 2 Brocade FC modules for our storage interfaces.

For our storage needs we chose the HP 3PAR 7200 2N. The 3PAR is nothing short of amazing. With a configured total physical (raw) storage capability of right at 6.5 TB consisting of 24 300GB 15K SAS drives with redundancy and utilizing the thin provisioning feature built in to the 3PAR software suite, we are able to present 16 TB of usable storage to our vSphere 5.x environment. This proved to be an excellent choice. The performance is stellar even under extreme loads. The configuration, management and monitoring software is first rate.

Added into the mix is an HP DL360 tasked with hosting, with VMware ESXi 5.x, a vApp version of VMware’s vCenter Server, a VM with a dedicated instance of 2008 R2 for Veeam One Monitoring software, the 3PAR service provider vApp and one more Windows VM to house the 3PAR management suite.

For battery backup duty, we tagged two of HP’s very capable R5500 UPSs for the heavy lifting and a single APC Smart-UPS 1500 for the networking gear.

With everything loaded up we have a total of 30u worth of space used in our custom 36u travel rack. All things considered, that’s a lot of compute in a relatively small package.