Don’t Buy Dell
Posted by John-Erik | Filed under Uncategorized
I hate Dell servers, their Poweredge support is worse than IBM’s Aptiva support. Second off, RAID 5 for a web server is really inapproipriate - RAID 1 or RAID 10/01 would be a much better choice.
The IBM xSeries 336 and 436 (1U and 2U, respectively) are a much better choice from a performance and availability. They also offer the EM64T so you can move to 64 bit later for the server. Oh yeah, did I mention chipkill memory and a custom ultra high performance chipset?
Another excelent choice is the Sun V20z. It’s WHQL certified (for those Sun shops that just have to have a Windows box or two) and costs $4240 with two 73 GB 10k SCSI disks, dual Opteron 244’s and 2 GB of RAM in a 1U chassis. It’s a bit over 4k, but nobody (and I mean nobody) ever pays list for a Sun box. If you promise to put a Sun logo on the front page for a few months, you may even get some bonuses.
On the Opteron bit, IBM sells them too, did you know? The eServer 325 adn 326, in fact. If it doesn’t come back, check them out too.
In webservers, adding additional capacity to a 10k drive actually provides more performance than going to a 15k drive (e.g. a 73 GB 10k is faster than a 15k 36 GB). RAID 1 or RAID 10/01 is the way to go too, since you don’t have to worry about RAID 5 performance issues and you can service two reads at once - further pushing the advantage over 15k drives.
- Supermicro X6DH8-XG2 - $579
- Two 2.8 GHz Nocona Xeons - $249 each
- Two Crucial 1 GB DIMMs - $359 each
- Supermicro 2U chassis with 6 hot-swap drive bays, CD and floppy - $599
- Adaptec 2010S ZCR - $205
- Four Seagate Cheetah 10k 73 GB for RAID 10 - $205 each
- Two Seagate Cheetah 10k 36 GB for RAID 1 - $159 each
Total cost: $4057 from Newegg - some pricewatch work could get that down.
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