Network performance 6.0 with netperf

[Michael VInce]

>
>
>On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 04:26:31PM +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
>  
>
>>> At 10:49 PM +1000 2005-10-20, Michael VInce wrote:
>>> 
>>    
>>
>>>> > The 4 ethernet ports on the Dell server are all built-in so I am assuming
>>>> > they are on the best bus available.
>>>      
>>>
>>> 
>>> 	In my experience, the terms "Dell" and "best available" very 
>>> rarely go together.
>>> 
>>> 	Dell has made a name for themselves by shipping the absolutely 
>>> cheapest possible hardware they can, with the thinnest possible 
>>> profit margins, and trying to make up the difference in volume. 
>>> Issues like support, ease of management, freedom from overheating, 
>>> etc... get secondary or tertiary consideration, if they get any 
>>> consideration at all.
>>> 
>>> 	But maybe that's just me.
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>
>>    
>>
> I think that's unfair.

> I have a couple of Dell machines and my biggest complaint with them 
> has been
> their use of proprietary bolt patterns for their motherboards and similar
> tomfoolery, preventing you from migrating their hardware as your needs 
> grow.
>
> This also guarantees that your $75 power supply becomes a $200 one 
> once the
> warranty ends - good for them, not good for you.
>
> Other than that, I've been pretty happy with their stuff. Sure beats a lot
> of other "PC" vendors out there in terms of reliability, heat management,
> BIOS updates, etc.
>
> --
> -- 
> Karl Denninger (karl at denninger.net) Internet Consultant & Kids Rights 
> Activist

I have to agree Karl,
Those slots aren't proprietary there PCI Express.
When I went to open the machine up to put in a PCI multi serial card all 
I saw were those little modern mean looking PCI Express slots which have 
the ability to scare any techie, there are no old PCI slots on it, I had 
to dump my serial card and change over to usb2serial converters by 
loading the ucom and uplcom as kernel modules so I could use tip to 
serial out of usb into the single serial port on the Dell machines when 
the ethernet is down which ended up working out great, I will never need 
clunky old (and price) multi port PCI serial cards again.

If you look at the chipset Intel E7520 of the Dell 1850/2850 (The 2850 
is really just a bigger case machine to hold more drives)
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/embedded/e7520.htm
You will see it just only has PCI Express as a minimum which is 
64bit/133mhz which does a minimum of 2.5GBs/sec in 1 direction and its a 
switched based bus technology where there is no sharing of the lanes,
there is no old school PCI 32bit/33mhz buses.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1087&page=3

As for service, I actually ordered two much smaller Dell 750's but 
because there were out of them for a couple of weeks due to some big 
company ordering 500 of them I had a bit of an argue with the Dell guy 
on the phone and got 1850s with scsi raid 1 out of him for the same price.
Its been Dell that has shown me how good (and maybe a bit evil) big 
companies can be.