Re: server vendor recommendation

I've purchased a number of systems (a dozen or so) from avadirect.

http://www.avadirect.com

Their prices are excellent, hardware is solid quality, their service is
median. This is a discount shop, so don't expect lightening support. But you
can buy three fast AVA systems of top-notch quality for the price of a single
HP or Sun server with "enterprise support". Those sound like pretty good
numbers if you are technically inclined.

I especially like their 1U Tyan-based 1U Opterons with 10k SCSI drives -
almost all of the systems I've purchased from them have been in this
configuration and all of these have worked very well for me. I have two right
now being torture tested in the other room. Quad-core Opterons, 4 GB ECC RAM,
dual 10k SCSI, great DB servers - sweet!

I like to buy two identical drives with the storage I need, and use Linux
kernel software RAID 1. This gives me good performance, redundancy, and
compatability that doesn't tie me to a specific chipset or RAID card. There
is room for 4 bays on the front, so I can add two more drives later if it's
needed. My O/S of choice is CentOS 4. http://www.centos.org

The only problem I've had with them is that I bought a couple of SuperMicro 1U
systems in a similar configuration and had issues, but so far, they've been
resolved equitably.

-Ben

PS: No, I don't work for them in any way.

On Wednesday 07 March 2007, snacktime wrote:
> Any recommendations for vendors that can build custom servers?
> Specifically opteron based with scsi raid.
>
> Chris
>
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