Re: Ideal Servers

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage peaknet net>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 09:49 -0800, Don Buchholz wrote:
> I've had really good luck with IBM equipment the last two years.

I'll ditto that. If you are looking at more than 4 servers, take a hard
look at IBM's HS20 blades -- especially if rack space is a factor. Big
Blue makes great iron, and they're committed to supporting RHEL.

Figure $2K for the chassis, and $2.9K (basic) or $4.7K (better) for each
HS20 blade server. One 7U chassis can hold up to 14 blades like books on
a shelf. Options include mirrored SCSI drives, 8G RAM, fibre channel SAN
support, and even a double-wide HS40 version with up to four 3.6GHz
"super" Xeons w/1M L2 cache for serious crunching.

The chassis requires 220VAC, and the cooling fans are very noisy (74dB).
As an overall package, though, IBM's BladeCenter design requires half
the space, and about 2/3 the power and cooling of any other servers.

-- Doc
Robert G. (Doc) Savage, BSE(EE), CISSP, RHCE | Fairview Heights, IL
RHEL3/ESu3 on Tyan S2468UGN w/3G, dual Athlon MP 2800+, 1.1T RAID5
"Perfection is the enemy of good enough."
                         -- Admiral of the Fleet Sergei G. Gorshkov