have a number of rackmount machines of various sorts in service at the
moment and, based on the relatively low load on them, am interested in
finding equipment that is more optimal from the environmental /
consumption point of view.
machines that are currently in use are a smattering of dell, hp, sun and
via c3 / c7 rigs. it is hard not to notice the substantial noise, power
draw and heat that comes from the dell and hp rackmount systems and i
would like to see if better rackmount server choices exist that satisfy
the following criteria:
- fast disks with hardware raid, i.e. u320 or sas, that are
hotswappable; am willing to accept SATAII if other criteria work
- non-i386 architecture; expect amd64 is the next best for cost
- decent processor speed and single core; these will be mailservers,
webservers, asterisk servers, etc, that aren't sufficiently loaded to
make processor speed a serious performance bottleneck
- low power draw / heat signature
- low noise
- 1U or 2U size
the via c3 / c7 systems definitely do the trick for simple stuff like
firewalls that don't require quick or redundant disks. my experience
also indicates that you can certainly fully load the processor of a via
c3 system and lag it pretty badly.
i look forward to suggestions :)
cheers,
jake
