On 06/03/2014 11:52 AM, Rainer Duffner wrote:
It’s also a bit of a sorry showing for the admin putting together the system.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Remember the old saw about simplicity and reliability? ECC ignores that saw completely, resulting in a complex, error prone hardware landscape fraught with incompatibilities.
With desktop systems, it's pretty straight forward to get memory that "just works". Yes, with ECC, all the specs are in the Motherboard manual, but there are far more variables to consider. And, even when you buy exactly to spec, I've had issues with systems that worked fine for days at high loads and passed extensive Memtest, but locked up sporadically (every few weeks), at a tremendous cost to diagnose. The only way I've found to be confident that a purchase will work is to buy only hardware on a specific hardware compatibility list, and typically I buy the hardware together. Most of our hardware is in this category.
I'll consider my irreverent point of view, that this complexity is unnecessary and counter-productive, as somewhat unpopular and leave it at that.
-Ben
PS: As an aside, we've had extremely good results with SuperMicro - we shop for them almost exclusively. The only problems we've had was with onboard SAS controller on a specific model on EL6 - worked fine on EL5. We ended up disabling SAS and going with onboard SATA with no further issues.