Shane,
> The department I work for is about ready to ditch Solaris in favor of
> Linux (due primarily to the cost and pain of maintaining Sun
> hardware). As the long time Linux evangelist, I'm now primarily
> responsible for deciding on a configuration for the new machine.
> When it comes to Linux, there are two issues that I feel underinformed
> on: RAID and SMP support. While I've had lots of experience with Linux
> over the years, I've never had an opportunity to try out its RAID or
> SMP capabilities. I can remember a time when neither of these
> functionalities was quite ready for prime-time, but my impression is
> that support is now fairly dependable for both of these.
There is pretty good support for most common hardware RAID (if not very
good), and the software RAID is excellent - were you at the DejaNews talk
we had? They've been using software RAID for some time, after figuring out
it was faster than the hardware (though their tests were a year or two
ago).
SMP has always been ready, just depending on the task - more and more
things have been SMP-optimized and are still being optimized, but it's a
definite advantage.
> Aside from the generic advantages of these features, how is using RAID
> and/or SMP with Linux going to affect my life? Particularly with
> RAID, does anyone have any experience regarding software vs. hardware
> based RAID? How about internal vs. external hardware RAIDS? I've
> read in places that especially on fast SMP machines that software RAID
> is just as fast as hardware.
look above for (non-expert, but informed) note on hardware vs. software
RAID. As far as SMP, the best uses for it seem to be very intensive apps
and general server applications - most servers have several services
running, and so don't even need SMP-optimized apps (though it can help if,
say, the web server is inundated with requests while ftp, mail, etc.. sit
idle).
> Finally, does anyone have any vendor reccommendations? Has anyone
> bought Linux servers from Dell?
Dell's PowerEdge servers are good - we use them in the SF TurboLinux
office. Compaq also has some pretty good stuff, though I don't like how
they have a sort of BIOS/config tool that needs a partition and can be
thus removed from the system causing *lots* of hassle - it's not standard,
so it's just another thing to remember. VA and Penguin Computing both
have great quality systems, though I've been told VA uses some proprietary
stuff and so you can need a special VA kernel for those systems.
later,
-Justin
> Thank you greatly for any and all help.
>
> --
> Public key at www-swiss.ai.mit.edu | Shane Williams
> /~bal/pks-toplev.html | Systems Administrator UT-GSLIS
> =----------------------------------+-------------------------------
> All syllogisms contain three lines | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Therefore this is not a syllogism | www.gslis.utexas.edu/~shanew
>
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-Justin
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