Re: What HW / OS is recommeded

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 11:41, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 12:28:22 -0500, Vivek Khera <khera(at)kcilink(dot)com> wrote:
> > >>>>> "a" == alex <alex(at)meerkatsoft(dot)com> writes:
> >
> > a> We are currently looking at Dell / HP
> > a> but the questions is
> >
> > a> - how many processors (2 or 4)
> > a> - do we gain with 4 cpus if we probably never have a few users connected
> > a> - what processors are recommended Opteron / Xeon / Itanium
> > a> - how much memory ? 2GB ? 4GB ?
> > a> - Disks, i guess we go with Raid5, 15k SCSI
> > a> - what OS ? Suse / RHE3 / Fedora /
> > a> - Disk controller ?
> >
> > Run, do not walk, from your Dell solution. I've never been able to
> > get "expected" performance from those boxes. They seem to do
> > something to the RAID controllers to make them not work as fast as one
> > would expect the equivalent name-brand part (eg, LSI RAID card or
> > Adaptec RAID card) and similar disk drives.
>
> Hate to burst your bubble, but the RAID controller that Dell ships is
> an Adaptec OEM. Dell just rebrands them.

I've use the Dell PERC 4DC and had VERY good performance from it. IT's
the late model U320 LSI MegaRAID and runs great. I do remember that the
2650 and few other Dells had the serverworks chipset in them that caused
a lot of context switches in heavy parallel load in a discussion on the
performance list. We weren't running heavy parallel, just a report
server with a dozen or so users, so it wasn't an issue for us.