On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Roy McMorran <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings, > Apologies in advance if I'm covering old ground here. I'd swear I'd seen a > similar discussion recently but I haven't been able to find it in the > archives. Anyway... > > I'm seeking recommendations for x86 based servers. Historically we have > been a Sun shop, and although it's probably been 4+ years since I've bought > any SPARC-based hardware, I have purchased several of their Intel-based > servers over the past few years. Since Sun were swallowed up by Oracle > their prices have gone up (or should I say the discounts have evaporated) so > it's time to consider other vendors. > > Most recently we've used the Sun x4170 with the Nehalem processors, and I'm > probably looking for something similar (although perhaps with Westmere > now). I'll probably consider Dell and HP, but I will also look at 'white > box' vendors. I seem to remember hearing good things about Silicon > Mechanics. > > Must-haves are console-over-LAN (command-line console preferred over KVM), > redundant power supplies, mirrored system disks. Disk space requirements > are minimal. FWIW these are going to be web servers running Apache httpd > and/or Tomcat. We'll be running RHEL. > > Thanks for any advice. > -- > Roy McMorran
Everyone's going to have a favorite (or hated) brand, and you're mostly going to get anecdotes. For scientific data, look at the market and see who the big guys are -- you already know who. There's a reason they are the big guys. Personally I've used Dell and HP. Dell most recently and HP at least 5 years ago. There have been many changes in server design since then. My most recent work with Dells has led me to a lot of respect. Their rapid-rails mounting system shows they are really putting a lot of thought into all aspects of their system design. You can really have a server in the rack in about 2 minutes. I've used white-box vendors, and mostly they don't stack up with the big guys in the "nice to have" category. Technically they might have the same processors, etc... but running servers isn't only about the processing guts. Dell's management is really very excellent. As for your console requirements, you're coming from Sun so be prepared to be disappointed. Dells have a built in DRAC which gives you a remote KVM (HP has something similar), which work well for the few times you need it. They don't, and no Intel server will, have a serial only console that works like a Sun console. The Dell's allow you to have some kind of access through the serial port, which allows you to access the BIOS during bootup. After that, you need to configure GRUB, Linux, and Getty manually to gain a login prompt over serial. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
