Re: Hardware suggestions for high performance 8.3

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jun 2008, Henrik wrote:
>
>> I've seen some concerns about buying database performance hardware from
>> DELL. Are there at least some of the RAID cards that work well with Linux or
>> should I stay clear of DELL permanently?
>
> People seem to be doing OK if the RAID card is their Perc/6i, which has an
> LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 1078 chipset under the hood. There's some helpful
> benchmark results and follow-up meesages related to one of those at
> http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/47D8B3B6.3010606@emolecules.com

Yeah, the problems I've had have been with the internal RAID (perc
5???) lsi based controllers. They kick their drives offline. Dell
has a firmware update but we haven't had a chance to install it just
yet to see if it fixes the problem with that one.

> That said, I consider the rebranded LSI cards a pain and hate the quality of
> Dell's hardware.

Yeah, I'd just as soon get a regular LSI bios as the remade one Dell
seems intent on pushing. Also, we just discovered the broadcom
chipsets we have in our Dell 1950s and 1850s will not negotiate to
gigabit with our Nortel switches. Everything else I've plugged in
just worked. Went looking at Dell's site, and for the 1950 they
recommend buying a dual port Intel NIC for it. Why couldn't they just
build in better NICS to start?