Re: Dell Hardware Recommendations

On 8/9/07, Arjen van der Meijden <acmmailing(at)tweakers(dot)net> wrote:
> On 9-8-2007 23:50 Merlin Moncure wrote:
> > Where the extra controller especially pays off is if you have to
> > expand to a second tray. It's easy to add trays but installing
> > controllers on a production server is scary.
>
> For connectivity-sake that's not a necessity. You can either connect
> (two?) extra MD1000's to your first MD1000 or you can use the second
> external SAS-port on your controller. Obviously it depends on the
> controller whether its good enough to just add the disks to it, rather
> than adding another controller for the second tray. Whether the perc5/e
> is good enough for that, I don't know, we've only equipped ours with a
> single MD1000 holding 15x 15k rpm drives, but in our benchmarks it
> scaled pretty well going from a few to all 14 disks (+1 hotspare).

As it happens I will have an opportunity to test the dual controller
theory. In about a week we are picking up another md1000 and will
attach it in an active/active configuration with various
hardware/software RAID configurations, and run a battery of database
centric tests. Results will follow.

By the way, the recent dell severs I have seen are well built in my
opinion...better and cheaper than comparable IBM servers. I've also
tested the IBM exp3000, and the MD1000 is cheaper and comes standard
with a second ESM. In my opinion, the Dell 1U 1950 is extremely well
organized in terms of layout and cooling...dual power supplies, dual
PCI-E (one low profile), plus a third custom slot for the optional
perc 5/i which drives the backplane.

merlin