Bryan J. Smith wrote:
Since good server designs have come up in the past, I wanted to point out a "low-cost" server option that has good I/O, and the vendor offers _your_choice_ of not only Fedora Core or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but _also_ CentOS _shipped_ with it!
IN-A-NUTSHELL ...
Starting at just over $750, you can get a single Socket-939 Opteron 1xx (dual-core is an option) system with up to 4GiB of ECC (but non- registered) DDR SDRAM, up to 4 hot-swap SATA bays (8114 model), one PCI- X slot (perfect for a 3Ware card, which they _do_ support ;-) and dual on-board GbE Broadcom NICs -- all in a 1U rackmount form-factor. The resulting I/O performance is excellent at the price-point for those that want a good server I/O well beyond typical "desktop/workstation" but for around the same price.
The 4 hot-swap drive configuration, with a decent amount of RAM, 3Ware card with the 4 drives in RAID-10 or 5, and, most importantly, with CentOS 4.2 shipped runs just a little over $2K. Not really much more than an equivalent "self-assembled desktop" you might be able to put together, while being a heck of a lot better in interconnect configuration and resulting server performance.
ASL Monarch 8110/8114/8115 (Left Column): http://www.aslab.com/products/storage/monarch.html
Thanks Bryan, this is a timely post for me. By the way, I tend to like your verbosity. My 0.02 cents worth.
Ed