Steven Kurylo <[email protected]> writes: > Redundancy and some kind of LOM (which works, which our old Dell RACs > don't really) is quite important to us.
Have you considered external console servers? in my experience, they are radically cheaper than the internal stuff. A 48 port OpenGear brand terminal server is $1500 or so. per-port, that's about an order of magnitude what you'd pay for a dell DRAC. Of course, if you are running windows and need a KVM over IP, this doesn't help, but serial consoles are /vastly superior/ for linux use. external serial consoles, in my experience both personally and working on Yahoo's search cluster, are much more reliable than both the HP ILO and the dell DRAC. (the hp ILO is marginally better than the dell DRAC, but it is still garbage compared to an external serial console.) It was pretty cool; at yahoo we actually had our perl guy write a script that connected to each serial console (and we had many different types of both external terminal servers and internal, IP access able serial consoles) and dumped the console log on one server. I could sit in one place and use grep to fine all the MCE panics and all the bad drives. Every 'server class' motherboard I've seen had the capability to redirect BIOS console over the serial port, and of course, you can do the same with grub and Linux once the box boots. _______________________________________________ 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/
