[Novalug] Looking for server vendor

John Franklin franklin@elfie.org
Sun Dec 10 11:23:03 EST 2006


You're saying Xeon, which is an Intel-specific thing.  Is AMD's  
Opteron acceptable?  Sun has some very nice Opteron systems [1] which  
they support with Linux.  If not Dell has some nice servers, too.[2]   
Everything I mention here has hot-swappable drives.  I'd suggest  
getting a system that supports at least five drives. That lets you  
have a RAID1 mirror for the OS and your three-disk RAID5 for  
storage.  I've worked with all these systems myself and they're all  
good.

Dell will sell you and pre-load RHEL4.  If you call them instead of  
going through they website, they may do RHEL3.  RHEL3, mind you, has  
just entered the long term maintenance phase of its lifecycle.  In  
about four years, it'll be unsupported by Red Hat entirely.  Unless  
there's some specific reason you're sticking with RHEL3, I'd suggest  
going up to RHEL4 or waiting until Q1 07 for RHEL5.

Dell 2950 can take up to 4 SATA or up to six 3.5" SAS drives or eight  
2.5" SAS drives.

Dell 6850 has a slow 800MHz FSB, so I'd avoid it. The other Dell  
systems have 1333MHz FSBs, and perform much better even with a lower  
processor clock speed.

Dell 6950 is an Opteron system with up to five SAS drives, and for  
memory-bound applications one of the fastest systems I've used.

Sun has an (AMD Opteron) SunFire 4100 or 4200 with four 2.5" SAS  
bays.  The 4100 gets it by losing the DVD drive.

SunFire v40z (AMD Opteron) has five SATA or SCSI drives.

If you need a truly stupid amount of storage, the Sun 4500 [3] takes  
forty-eight (48) SATA drives slotted in from the top for up to 24TB  
of space today with 500GB drives.

If you get a RHEL subscription, you can download the ISOs from http:// 
rhn.redhat.com/, but they only have CD images.  When I get in to work  
on Monday, I'll send you a script that takes a directory of CD images  
and turns it into a single DVD image.  It used to be on  
people.redhat.com, but I guess the guy who wrote it quit.

[1] http://www.sun.com/servers/index.jsp?gr0=arch&fl0=arch4&gr1=
[2] http://www.dell.com/content/products/compare.aspx/rack_optimized? 
c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
[3] http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/

On Dec 10, 2006, at 7:58 AM, Igor Birman wrote:

> RAID-5, 3 drives, 500GB usable space.  Redhat Enterprise Server 3 -  
> software RAID is ok, but where do I get a copy of Redhat 3?  Can I  
> download it from redhat if I purchase a subscription?
>
> Igor
>
> John Franklin <franklin@elfie.org> wrote:
> How much RAID?  RAID1?  RAID5?  73G of storage or multiple TB of  
> storage?
>
> jf
>
> On Dec 8, 2006, at 1:07 PM, Igor Birman wrote:
>
>> I need to build or buy a server with a Xeon chip and RAID by  
>> Tuesday.  Can anyone recommend a vendor?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Igor
>> _______________________________________________
>> Novalug mailing list
>> Novalug@calypso.tux.org
>> http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug
>
> -- 
> John Franklin
> franklin@elfie.org
> ICBM: 38º 56' 32.6"N 77º 24' 47.7"W Z+62m
>
>

-- 
John Franklin
franklin@elfie.org
ICBM: 38º 56' 32.6"N 77º 24' 47.7"W Z+62m

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