Repurpose Isilon A2000 nodes

Posted by OldObject4651@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 13 comments

Have small Isilon/OneFS cluster with A2000 nodes. It’s going off support and will be decommissioned in a couple months. Will it be possible to repurpose these 4U nodes into something like a Linux server, or possibly a Proxmox cluster? Asking here as the Isilon sub looks very quiet

Reply to Post

13 Comments

[-]

razorback6981@reddit

Dispose it or resell it.

[-]

jdptechnc@reddit

This sounds like a terrible idea. Did the poopysysadmin sub leak into here again?

[-]

cmack@reddit

Manager or one whom needs their sysadmin card revoked?

[-]

S7relok@reddit

Please don't. You will consume an insane amount of electricity, produce a truckload of heat for performance for a thing that don't worth it. If it's not for a datacenter, stick to towers and put big HDDs if there is a need of disk space. You can do nice things like ceph clusters with proxmox with multiple little towers

[-]

OldObject4651@reddit (OP)

It’s all sitting in a on-prem computer room, so it’s not homelab or anything. Power and heat isn’t a super big worry, capex is a bigger problem(which is why repurpose is a thing..)

[-]

S7relok@reddit

In a company context, without warranty? It will become worse with the time, and IT team will lose time maintaining old unsupported enclosures. Maybe putting it in a test/lab environment for your team's training can be an idea

[-]

pdp10@reddit

It's been years since I touched the hardware, but Isilons then were all vanilla Supermicro servers with custom colors and branding. Are the back-end NICs of your units Infiniband or Ethernet? It would be a matter of booting USB to a Linux installer. They might have more value to Isilon users than as generic servers, though. It's been fairly common to find EoS Isilons in production.

[-]

mexell@reddit

A2000 isn’t SMC anymore, they are custom EMC-era stuff and came with Ethernet backend.

[-]

pdp10@reddit

> they are custom EMC-era stuff Right, owned by Dell now, so presumably Dell-derived hardware. The only Dell-based system we used to have was a Greenplum.

[-]

mexell@reddit

The A2000 is still based on custom mainboards. Later, with the PowerScale F series all-flash stuff, this was changed to Poweredge-based designs, but these are all custom.

[-]

mexell@reddit

A2000 has very meh CPU and RAM, as well as a rather small cache SSD. Also, those 4U chassis contain four nodes each. I’d be using those as storage target for backups, or as test system for your other Isilons maybe.

[-]

OldObject4651@reddit (OP)

Nics are all 25Gig Ethernet

[-]

autogyrophilia@reddit

It's simply too big for something that is not production workload. Too much power, heat and space. Sell them second-hand. Or convince managment of some usecase for an additional storage rack, but besides "More backups" I just don't see it.