In July of 2020, CIT was once again able to upgrade our private cloud stack! We changed direction, slightly, to better align with current industry trends - we moved away from the traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) towards Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). We purchased:
- 4 x 2U Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node - Hybrid, each with:
- 2 x Intel Xeon Silver 4215 CPUs (@ 2.5GHz with 8 hyper-threading cores)
- 12 x 16GB DDR4 sticks of RAM running at 2933 MT/s (for a total of 192 GB per server)
- 8 hard drives (2 x M.2 SSD, RAID 1, for booting, plus 4 x 3TB SAS drives, for hyper-converged storage)
Update: In early 2023, each host had a RAM upgrade, and each node now has 24 x 16GB DDR4 sticks of RAM, for a total of 384 GB!
This is a picture of our full rack, as of the summer of 2020.
The top ~25% is full of networking switches, patch panels, and cable management trays.
Under the giant void (left for expansion? haha) is a 1U pull-out rack console, followed by the new 4 x 2U MX nodes.
Directly under those you'll see the 4 rack servers, and the SAN, from the previous upgrade.
Under that is our current NAS, followed by 4 UPSs.
Previous Infrastructure
The first upgrade - July, 2016:
Due to enrollment growth, along with the growing reliance on VMs for certain classes, CIT was granted permission to purchase new equipment for our Private Cloud. We purchased:
- 4 Lenovo System-X 3550 M5 Rack Servers, each with
- 2 x Intel E5-2620V3 (6 Core with Hyper-Threading) CPUs
- 128 GB RAM - 1 Direct-attached SAS SAN
- with 19 x 600GB 2.5" spinning-disk SAS drives
- 1 HD assigned as global hot spare
- 2 virtual RAID 5s created using 9 disks each, for a total usable space of 9.6TB - 2 IBM UPSs
This is what our rack looked like "back then" ->
The first private cloud - April, 2011!
Our first-ever private cloud was built on:
- An IBM Blade Chassis
- 4 x well-equipped Blades
- 2 x new UPSs
- A SAN
What are Blade Chassis and Blades?
A Blade Chassis is, essentially, a box containing all of the power, management, and communications connections necessary to support blades, which are small form factor servers.
The chassis contains a Media Bay (which contains a couple of USB ports, as well as an optical drive), four empty blade bays, and two blade bays that have covers in them (to help maintain airflow, and keep the dust out). This chassis supports up to 6 blades, and internal storage (the wide areas on either side) that we are not using (we went for a SAN instead).
Here's the blade chassis - the left is unpopulated (no blades, but with 2 empty filler/covers, to the right of the open bays), and the right is populated with our four blades (not a lot of difference in appearance!)
This is what the blades look like, with (on the left) and without (on the right) it's shield/lid:
