Re: Server Grade Hardware Purchase [OT]

Sun x86 hardware is hit and miss. The v20z and v40z were actually rebrands of 
boxes maybe by another company, but they were pretty good. The Sun in house 
engineered replacements for those were also good. The 32bit intel hardware they 
put out before all of those was sub-par. Not awful, but not great.

When I worked in HPC we had large clusters of IBM, Sun, and Dell hardware. The 
Dell hardware was good enough, cheap enough, and doggonit we liked the service too!

The only thing Sun really had on Dell was AMD Opteron's at the time. We were not 
pleased performance wise with the Intel chipsets, mostly due to memory bus 
architecture bottlenecks. These aren't so much a problem anymore, and probably 
wouldn't effect you even if they were.

Disclaimer: this is all opinion based on my experience.

Chris Moates wrote:
> This is as bad as asking "Which distro is the best?" in many ways, as 
> experience will vary a lot.
> 
> We are about to end of life the last of some SuperMicro machines we 
> bought less than 18 months ago due to hardware issues with their RAID 
> subsystem which SuperMicro can't seem to resolve. Their support has been 
> great, but the end result is still broken servers.
> 
> I can't speak for Sun's x86 hardware, but their Sparc hardware, while 
> underpowered and overpriced, was always well engineered.
> 
> My current and former employer both used Dell heavily. About 100 servers 
> here and a few thousand at my last employer. The 2900 series is a good 
> low-end server.
> 
> I haven't personally used any HP hardware in a decade. As you say 
> though, rumor has it it doesn't suck like it used to.
> 
> All in all, I can't think of many good reasons to choose Dell over the 
> others, based on my limited knowledge. Their support is great, hardware 
> replacement is super fast (especially if you pay for the 4 hour 
> warranty, or whatever it is called), prices are cheap, Linux support is 
> excellent, and the build quality is above average.
> 
> Does the vendor of your software have a hardware recommendation?
> 
> Chris
> 
> Bob K Mertz wrote:
>> Take a look at Sun's x86 solutions or SuperMicro.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: "Josiah Ritchie" <josiah.ritchie@...>
>>
>> Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:04:28 To:cplug@...
>> Subject: [CPLUG] Server Grade Hardware Purchase [OT]
>>
>>
>> I haven't purchased server grade hardware in over a year. In my prior
>> shop, we would almost always default to Dell. I've heard whispers that
>> HP is the way to go. I want a machine that I know runs lots of other
>> places without any trouble rather than something I build from scratch
>> or someone else tosses together for me and I want something
>> economical. The server will host an application called MPower and it's
>> SQL based database. (It's win only now, but they are moving toward the
>> open source which will include linux and MySQL support I hear.) The
>> machine will unlikely have more than 5 consecutive users in its
>> lifetime.
>>
>> I'm spec'ing out a PowerEdge 2900. I thought some of you guys might
>> have something better with the latest info and given that it may turn
>> into a Linux box in the future.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> JSR/
>>
>>   
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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