shopping for a new server

[Kevin Wilcox]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 12:45, Tim Kellers <timothyk at wallnet.com> wrote:

> Dell 2500 from 10 years back is soon to be very dead in the machine room at
> work.  I'm thinking about replacing it with a Rack mount Dell R610  has
> anyone used that and has compatibility issues or successes?  I'll be using a
> RAID 5 setup and PERC version is up to 6i in this box, any issues with this
> PERC?  The specs indicate R610 will way outperform the old 2500.  The 2500
> currently supports mail (sendmail), web, db (pgsql and mysql), samba, etc.

I can't recommend the R610 highly enough. I have them as
firewall/routers and DNS servers and they are fantastic. 8.2-RELEASE
amd64.

As Maxim pointed out, they use the mfi and bce drivers...I've added
some Intel quad-port fibre NICs using the igb driver to the firewalls
and haven't had any issues.

My only suggestion is to pay attention to disk speed and RAID type if
you're going to do heavy database work. I have a 200GB PostGreSQL
database on RAID5 with 10K disks that crawls on data loads so I'm in
the process of verifying to RAID 1+0 performance (we're neither CPU-
nor memory-bound but the reported disk I/O via iostat is atrocious).
dmesg for any of our R610s available on request if you want specifics.

kmw