Glenn Eychaner wrote:
I am trying to assemble or purchase a set of CentOS 6 compatible SFF workstations, and am finding it incredibly frustrating to do so. hardware.redhat.com is so slow as to be useless and provides almost no information about each of the 1,300 or so products listed in their database; clicking through them one at a time is incredibly frustrating (and about half of them are discontinued or out of stock when I actually go looking for them, like the Intel DQ series motherboards I was interested in). Vendor web sites are almost no use; they trumpet their Windows 8 compatibility all over the site, but finding information about Linux compatibility is next to impossible. My requirements aren't overwhelming; an i7 processor, four memeory slots preferred, dual 24" (1920x1200) monitor capability, and dual ethernet (or an expansion slot for a second Ethernet card). Anyone have any advice on how to attack this these days? I've been out of the hardware-purchase game on the Linux side for years, and most of my bookmarks no longer point anywhere useful, sadly.
Well, I have no idea was SFF is an acronym for, other than Science Fiction and Fantasy, but I see from your sig that you're doing astronomy, so I'm guessing it has something to do with scientific computing.
Question 1: do you want to build them yourself, or buy full systems?
OEM: Dell's fine, though to talk to someone in support about Linux, you need "enterprise support", *not* desktop support. Right now, I'm on an AMD, but Dell Precision T3500 workstation, I *think* it ran around $2k when we got it a year and a half or two years ago; the newer ones are the same price. I'm running CentOS 6.4. Pretty much anything you buy, except *possibly* for just-released-in-the-last-month hardware is supported: it may not be ultra-heavy gaming ready, but for anything else, yes.
Our servers with Intel are running Xeons, of course, as well as the one workstation I just looked at....
mark