Sun Fire X2100 -- nForce4 Ultra desktop chipset

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 21:52 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I've used nForce4 Ultra in my other (home) RAID server, precisely because
> it's a good performer, and inexpensive. So is the Sun Fire X2100 box,
> I'm not aware of another barebone with this quality for
> 600 EUR. 

You'd be surprised.

> The system has 2x GBit Ethernet,

GbE on its own means nothing.

> and in a pinch that PCIe can take an IB or Myrinet adaptor.

Agreed.  PCIe affords NIC and other options.

> The redundancy can be achieved with a distributed file system,

At a massive performance penalty.

> or a AoE SATA enclosure.

Don't tell me you've bought into their marketing too?  ;->
CoRAID's performance is crap, as well as its features (or lackthereof).

But let's talk beyond that.
Redundancy is much cheaper internally.

Or with a real SAN solution when you need failover.

> I would be very interested in a list of alternatives, in about the
> same price range (preferrably, with IPMI). I'm not aware of any.

nForce Professional chipsets, as well as the Broadcom ServerWorks
HT1000.  Mainboards start at $200, both Socket-939 or 940.

> I've since seen benchmarks which don't show more than 10% performance
> increase in best case, so NCQ is not that important.

Agreed.

> I've gone with dual Hitachi Deskstar T7250s, which is a reasonable
> approximation to an enterprise SATA drive.

Actually, the Western Digital Raptor is an SATA version of the Hitachi
UltraStar 10k.  But I'd still consider 24x7 rated drives, even in the
commodity capacities.

> Linux MD RAID device works adequately. We'll see how zfs compares.

Linux MD does the job adequately enough, I agree.  On the SATA channels
of the nForce4/Pro, at least they are on their own PCIe x1 channel.

Not nearly as good as a PCI-X or PCIe hardware controller, but it does
the job.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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