Recommended rack-mount servers?
Discussion
I need to buy 4 rackmount servers. They need to be fairly high performance. They won't be used for hosting, instead they'll be running a CPU/disk intensive application.
The last one I bought to do the same job was a Supermicro 1u Xeon 3xxx jobbie with SATA drives and I've been happy with it but I thought it best to look around and see if I can get a better deal or more bang for my buck.
Also, these new 4 servers will be installed in Australia and I need to offer local hardware support for them which means I need to use hardware likely to be supported over there. I suppose Dell and IBM could be worth looking at but I'm not a huge fan of either.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Any Supermicro users out there who can share their experiences?
Oh, and I've thought of something else - these racks may have to go in an office environment sometimes, so we don;t really want anything too noisey.
The last one I bought to do the same job was a Supermicro 1u Xeon 3xxx jobbie with SATA drives and I've been happy with it but I thought it best to look around and see if I can get a better deal or more bang for my buck.
Also, these new 4 servers will be installed in Australia and I need to offer local hardware support for them which means I need to use hardware likely to be supported over there. I suppose Dell and IBM could be worth looking at but I'm not a huge fan of either.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Any Supermicro users out there who can share their experiences?
Oh, and I've thought of something else - these racks may have to go in an office environment sometimes, so we don;t really want anything too noisey.
Edited by fastfreddy on Thursday 16th August 13:32
We used to be exclusively Supermicro.. then we dropped about 29 psus in one day, never touched them again!
Dell now, and never looked back..
The biggest bang they offer atm is a Dual QuadCore (8 Physical, 16 Logical) cpu box, in a 1u form factor.
They offer a 2u version which can have 5Tb of Raid5 storage too..
and cheapest ones are the DualCore Xeons ~ £4-500
J
Dell now, and never looked back..
The biggest bang they offer atm is a Dual QuadCore (8 Physical, 16 Logical) cpu box, in a 1u form factor.
They offer a 2u version which can have 5Tb of Raid5 storage too..
and cheapest ones are the DualCore Xeons ~ £4-500
J
How long ago did you have the psu problems?
I do get the over temperature warning light coming on sometimes (from cold) but it usually goes away after a reboot. This is one reason I've been thinking about changing as I can live with it in a development system, but I don;t want problems like that affecting production systems.
I do get the over temperature warning light coming on sometimes (from cold) but it usually goes away after a reboot. This is one reason I've been thinking about changing as I can live with it in a development system, but I don;t want problems like that affecting production systems.
fastfreddy said:
How long ago did you have the psu problems?
I do get the over temperature warning light coming on sometimes (from cold) but it usually goes away after a reboot. This is one reason I've been thinking about changing as I can live with it in a development system, but I don;t want problems like that affecting production systems.
The psu issue was in 2001, there was a power surge and it popped 29 supermicro psus.. dead..I do get the over temperature warning light coming on sometimes (from cold) but it usually goes away after a reboot. This is one reason I've been thinking about changing as I can live with it in a development system, but I don;t want problems like that affecting production systems.
no dell was harmed and carried on without skipping a heartbeat.
Ended up sending taxis all accross london to every SM dealer we could source to buy up their stocks.
I've hundreds and hundreds of Dell servers now, they just work!
I always had compatability issues with the SM's for NIC / RAID drivers on Unix..
non of that on the Dells!
FWIW, I'm running a system at the moment which uses four IBM X3650 rackmounts, 2 x 3GHz twin-core Xeons, 8Gb of memory & 1.2 Tb of disk. (Although running Linux, not Winblows) I have no complaints, although I expect they'll burst into flames the minute I hit "Submit". Since I've had them a year, I expect they've been superseded.
HP's DL range are about as good as you can get for 1-2u rack servers. HP UK (not sure about Aus) are currently doing rebates on CPU and memory upgrades, I just bought a couple of DL360's (1u) with eight cores, 4GB and SAS RAID for ~£1300 ex VAT and disks.
Also if your app really is disk intensive then SATA almost certainly won't cut it. You really want a heavyweight SAS controller with BBWC and as many spindles as you can fit in the box.
Also if your app really is disk intensive then SATA almost certainly won't cut it. You really want a heavyweight SAS controller with BBWC and as many spindles as you can fit in the box.
I'd go for dual CPU quad core HP DL360 G5. We've had nothing but incompetence and fail from successive Dell account managers on all fronts recently so wouldn't dream of going with them for servers again. Our HP kit has been very reliable, we've had one CPU go, and one DOA box in 4 years (and the usual disks going, but that's par for the course). HP will do onsite hardware support and the iLO allows excellent remote access too.
agent006 said:
I'd go for dual CPU quad core HP DL360 G5. We've had nothing but incompetence and fail from successive Dell account managers on all fronts recently so wouldn't dream of going with them for servers again. Our HP kit has been very reliable, we've had one CPU go, and one DOA box in 4 years (and the usual disks going, but that's par for the course). HP will do onsite hardware support and the iLO allows excellent remote access too.
In this case, remote access could be very useful as we'll have to support these machines from the UK. What's iLO?plasticpig said:
I would also go with HP DL kit. My company dosn't sell anything other than HP these days as they seem to have the best techichal / warranty support.
Another vote for HP from me too. Won't supply anything else these days as it's pretty reliable (apart from some of the 72GB hot swap drives a few years back) and when it does go wrong the HP warranty does what it says on the tin.fastfreddy said:
it's just a pci card that allows you to effectively VNC to the machine outside of the machine, ie if the machine has crashed it still works, if the machine is powered down it still works..
lets you do remotely what you could do from a local KVM.
J
Thanks - sounds useful.
HP seems to outweigh Dell here then.
Had a look at the Dell Poweredge 1950 and HP DL360 and there's not much in it on price for similar specifiactions. Both are well within the budget for this project.
One more question - if I run XP rather than Server 200x, I won't have any compatibility issues will I?
HP seems to outweigh Dell here then.
Had a look at the Dell Poweredge 1950 and HP DL360 and there's not much in it on price for similar specifiactions. Both are well within the budget for this project.
One more question - if I run XP rather than Server 200x, I won't have any compatibility issues will I?
fastfreddy said:
What's iLO?
Integrated Lights-OutBasically it's an integrated management interface included with most HP servers. You can monitor the health of the server and control certain functions (e.g. power) remotely, regardless of the state of the OS. You can also enable remote console functionality by puchasing an advanced license pack. This allows you to view the system console (independently of the OS) and mount local disks or images, allowing you to do almost anything remotely that you could do at the console, like perform a bare metal OS installation or recovery. Bloody handy, especially if your servers are going to be 12,000 miles away.
http://www.rackable.com/
These are the guys that people doing real 'x86' compute use - I've seen DCs with 50,000+ of these all racked & identical all running a single 'application'... If you're in the Intel/AMD area then fully recommended.
These are the guys that people doing real 'x86' compute use - I've seen DCs with 50,000+ of these all racked & identical all running a single 'application'... If you're in the Intel/AMD area then fully recommended.
Another advocate of HP kit here.
I recently bought a DL145 G3 which is a 1U dual opteron based server. It was relatively cheap and it's very quick, but it is incredibly noisy so I wouldn't advise it for your situation.
I'd have to agree with the comments about not using SATA for a disk intensive application. You don't get anything like the performance you do from scsi kit, despite the headline figures quoted for the drives. You would achieve much better overall performance by spending less on the processor spec and more on a decent disk array in my experience.
Another small point, that problably isn't an issue for you, but check the depth of the servers and make sure they fit in your racks before buying. We were supplied with a very shallow rack, conseqently none of the kit we have bought to go in the rack will attach to the front and rear supports, meaning it all sits on top of each other at the bottom, which is not ideal! I suspect that most people won't have this problem, but it's worth a quick check!
I recently bought a DL145 G3 which is a 1U dual opteron based server. It was relatively cheap and it's very quick, but it is incredibly noisy so I wouldn't advise it for your situation.
I'd have to agree with the comments about not using SATA for a disk intensive application. You don't get anything like the performance you do from scsi kit, despite the headline figures quoted for the drives. You would achieve much better overall performance by spending less on the processor spec and more on a decent disk array in my experience.
Another small point, that problably isn't an issue for you, but check the depth of the servers and make sure they fit in your racks before buying. We were supplied with a very shallow rack, conseqently none of the kit we have bought to go in the rack will attach to the front and rear supports, meaning it all sits on top of each other at the bottom, which is not ideal! I suspect that most people won't have this problem, but it's worth a quick check!
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