[CentOS] Re: newer HP G4 and G5 servers and centos :-)

Thu May 24 21:24:03 UTC 2007
Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com>

Walt Reed spake the following on 5/24/2007 1:20 PM:
> On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 10:48:18PM +0300, Mindaugas said:
>>> Anyone on the list using newer HP G4 or G5 server hardware like DL36X or
>>> DL38X with Centos? Or other HP hardware?
>>>
>>> Are you running Intel, AMD, or both?
>>>
>>> Are you using SAS or SATA or a mix?
>>>
>>> Are you using Centos 3, CentOS 4, or starting migration to CentOS 5
>>>
>>> Are things rock solid stable without any issues?
>>>
>>> I know older Compaq and HP boxen have been rock solid for us for years yet
>>> we wanted to check and test the waters b4 we consider unloading some bread.
>>   We are using quite a lot of such boxes with CentOS and RHEL. Things
>>   are mostly rock solid except DL380G4. Those were absolute crap for
>>   us. If I remember right from 6 such servers we had to replace 1 DIMM
>>   in 3 or 4 servers, 2 DIMMs in one server. We also had ASR problems
>>   with one server. Our supplier brought motherboard for replacement
>>   which was even worse than ours. So they had to replace back our old
>>   motherboard and order one more motherboard from HP.
> 
> I've got about 20 DL380G4's and have had Very few problems. We've had
> bad memory in a few servers, but no more frequently than any other model
> of HP we have. Any memory problem I've seen has shown up within the
> first month. It helps that we burn them in for a month before putting
> them into production. I run some drive / memory excersizing utilities
> during this time that pound on the server pretty hard. Compiling the
> Linux kernel over and over again also seems to be a good test :-)
> 
> Failures after the burn-in period are quite rare with the exception of
> 500G SATA drives which we have in a few archival arrays. They  seem to
> go bad frequently. 15K RPM 142G SCSI also seem to fail more frequently
> than the norm. By comparison, I have never had an EMC drive (several
> hundred FC and SATA) go bad in the ~2 years they have been running by
> comparison, and they get pounded on a LOT harder.
I also had a rash of 500 G SATA drives fail I lost 4 out of 12 in the first
month, and 2 more since I went into production. I think the Maxtor drives they
were using are no longer being sold, and the replacements have been rock solid
 for over a year. The Adaptec SATA raid controllers have been nothing but
junk, but it is probably also related to the Maxtor drives. I will never buy
anything but 3ware SATA unless they mess with EXT2/3 again.

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