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Dell EMC can help you define an entry-level cluster that can scale as the business grows while you control your present capital and operating costs. We are aware that not all container ecosystems need hundreds of servers. Customers who are new to containerization ask for a minimum platform configuration. No single cluster size fits all situations and circumstances. A typical entry-level production platform in the corporate and enterprise markets has between 10 and 30 compute nodes. Large industrial-grade container ecosystems require several full racks of servers per cluster or multiple clusters per data center.
This solution design uses PowerEdge R640 and PowerEdge R740xd servers for compute and storage.
The PowerEdge R640 is a general-purpose platform that supports up to 7.68 TB of memory and twelve 2.5-in. drives and provides flexible I/O options. It is a dual-socket, 1U platform that is ideal for dense scale-out data center computing.
The PowerEdge R640 features:
PowerEdge R640 servers are preferred for the CSAH and master node roles because the needs of these node types are easily accommodated in this 1U node configuration. Dell EMC recognizes that customers might prefer to use identical server configurations for all nodes in their cluster and might therefore choose Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers instead.
Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 and R740xd are two socket, 2U rack servers designed to run complex workloads using highly scalable memory, I/O capacity and network options. The R740 and R740xd features the 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family, up to 24 DIMMs, PCI Express® (PCIe) 3.0 enabled expansion slots, and a choice of network interface technologies to cover NIC and rNDC. The PowerEdge R740 is a general-purpose platform capable of handling demanding workloads and applications, such as data warehouses, e-commerce, databases, and high-performance computing (HPC). The PowerEdge R740xd adds extraordinary storage capacity options, making it well-suited for data- intensive applications that require greater storage, while not sacrificing I/O performance.
PowerSwitch S series switches provide the architectural agility and flexibility that are ideal for Ready Stack for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.2.
This Ready Stack design uses the following switches:
For more information about Dell EMC PowerSwitch networking technology, see Chapter 3, Networking Infrastructure and Configuration.