21 October 2006 07:37 tonyrogerson

MCS Clustering, now in reach of the SME (< £17,000 )

Recently I was asked to cost up a new cluster and I was astonished at how cheap it is now - HP Cluster, 5GB per machine, 7 x 146GB disks for under £17,000.

 

The cost of creating and using a Microsoft Cluster has significantly dropped of late, in fact, in my honest opinion its now practical for Small – Medium size businesses or systems.

 

Take the HP ProLiant DL380 G4 Packaged Cluster with MSA500 G2 for instance, places like Inmac and PC World are kicking the base configuration (2 x DL380’s and the MSA500) for a mere £4,781, ok that is with 1GB of RAM and no disks and no software but that price is really good.

 

A 146GB 10Krpm Ultra320 SCSI disk knocks out at around £215 and memory – a 2GB kit you can get for £300 (£600 for 2 machines).

 

Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 x64 version knocks out at around £2,100 of which you’ll need two copies and SQL 2005 Standard x64 will set you will cost you £4000 per physical processor and if you a) only have 1 physical processor (remember, you don’t pay for cores) and b) only use the cluster in an active/passive scenario (SQL Server is only running on one of the machines at a time) then you only need pay £4000.

 

Two node clustering is included with the standard edition of SQL Server 2005!

 

So, an average system: 7 x 146GB disks, 4 in RAID 10 and 2 in RAID 1 and 1 hot spare, 5GB of RAM will cost you:

         

          Package base           £4,781

          7 disks                    £1,505

          4 2GB kits                £1,200

          Windows 2003         £2,000

          SQL 2005                £4,000

          Kit Total                  £13,486

 

Ok, there are still some bits on top of that that you need to consider – racking, cabling into existing infrastructure, keyboard, mouse and monitor if required; but a complete working cluster for under £15,000 is special!

 

If you wanted me to come build it for you, it usually takes me 2 days to install, configure and commission (test) and that will set you back another £1,700.

 

So, to conclude – clustering really is in the price range of everybody now.

 

The actual architecture I recommend to people is cluster your production server and have a hot standby if possible but definitely have a remote disaster recovery server, the hot standby would sit next to the cluster and would protect you in case the MSA500 itself fails, you use database mirroring (full safety) for that, the remote DR server you need to log ship to because its usually across a link that has lower latency (don’t mix bandwidth available with throughput) and because standard edition of SQL Server doesn’t do asynchronous mirroring then you need to use log shipping.

 

If I get time I’ll knock a diagram up, any questions?

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Comments

# re: MCS Clustering, now in reach of the SME (&lt; &#163;17,000 )

23 October 2006 11:41 by Colin Leversuch-Roberts

Yeah I agree it's at a reasonable price, but unless you're actually paranoid about availability, and do most small companies actually need that level of availability? then i suggest the added complexity and cost of managing a cluster outweighs the perceived advantages, I still think in most cases failover with log shipping is a better solution.

# re: MCS Clustering, now in reach of the SME (&lt; &#163;17,000 )

23 October 2006 11:52 by tonyrogerson

Good points Colin.

Personally I love Database Mirroring as a failover mechanism, two machines sit side by side cross wired using gigabit or bonded gigabit and mirror; then use log shipping out to a remote DR server.

The problem is that when you need to failover you need to changing the connection string to point at the different server name (unless you are using ADO.NET 2.0), the cluster solution has the virtual cluster so thats covered.

The time it takes to change a connection string depends on your application, for web apps its simple and takes seconds, for desktop applications its more involved....

# re: MCS Clustering, now in reach of the SME (&lt; &#163;17,000 )

24 October 2006 13:06 by beckylou

Tony, we're currently looking into clustering SQL Server, with respects to load balancing - but cannot find any documentation of how to set it up.

Could you point us in the direction of how to setup a clustered SQL box?

Thanks.

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# re: MCS Clustering, now in reach of the SME (&lt; &#163;17,000 )

26 October 2006 07:57 by tonyrogerson

Hi Becky Lou, sorry for delay in getting back.

You can't load balance SQL Server with Microsoft Clustering, its just there for failover, literally one instance of SQL Server can only run against the database at any point in time (unless you are using enterprise edition and doing the shared scale out reporting services stuff but then its read only).

Setting up a cluster is straightforward now; check out bol for a ton of info (sql 2005).

If you want load balancing for SQL Server you'll need to set up two active instances (two databases) and replicate between the two.

Hope that helps.