new server hardware recommendations ?

[Skylar Thompson]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 01:28:56AM +0200, Stephan van Beerschoten wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I'm will be retiring my old and trusty rackmount machine soon and will
> be purchasing a new one to replace it. The old one was a home-grown
> combination of hardware, fitting into a 2U chassis.
> 
> For its replacement however, I am looking for a more professional
> system, including professional (hardware) support if needed, because I
> will be trying to run some paid services of it.
> Something from a vendor like Dell, IBM or HP/Compaq.
> Something that preferably fits into 1U and can give me some degree of
> hardware fault tolerance like a raid5 built-in on 3 disks.
> I have seen something like this coming from Dell for example (allthough
> I'd really rather use 2x AMD64, which Dell doesn't do ..)
> 
> Anyway, who is using FreeBSD in a professional world on hardware like
> this ? Anyone with a recommendation?
> This 'swap' won't happen untill Q4 this year, so it will be running
> 5-STABLE then. Please take this new platform into consideration for when
> recommending new hardware.

Although I can highly recommend Dell systems, FreeBSD has an annoying bug
wrt to their 1U system (the Poweredge 1750) where the SCSI bus will hang if
you have more than one device installed at boot time. This apparently
doesn't happen if you have the $400 RAID option card installed; it only
happens when the SCSI bus is a plain SCSI bus.

Other than that, I've been very happy with Poweredges. We also have 2650
running FreeBSD 4.10, and it's been a pleasure to work with. It's blazingly
fast (especially compared to our old dual P-III setup), reliable, and has
FreeBSD support for *everything*. There's a software utility for the PERC
RAID card (aaccli), a kernel support for the remote-access controller, etc.
I'd highly recommend it.

-- 
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar at cs.earlham.edu)
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/
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