[CentOS] server specifications

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 7:01 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
> On 02/13/11 2:42 PM, Michel Donais wrote:
>> I checked recently for  an ASUS S775 P5Q-VM G45 PCIE MOTHERBOARD with an
>> INTEL CORE 2 QUAD Q9550 2.83G/1333/12M/S775 with SATA hard disc no Raid
>> I doesn't seem to be a server board and I'm not shure of that choice.
>
> thats desktop hardware.  no ECC support.   anything running a business
> application for 50 users is probably mission important or mission
> critical, and undetected creeping bit errors due to lack of ECC would
> be, in my book, unacceptable.
>
> I'd probably use a HP or Dell 1U or 2U server, with redundant power, ECC
> memory, and at least mirrored system drives.

It's also possible to save the budget, buy *two* similarly powerful
used systems with much lesser hardware specs, and have genuine
failover instead of the shared vulnerability of one expensive server
with high-availability components as you describe. I've done both, and
encourage using less expensive hardware in pairs: that makes upgrading
a lot cheaper and helps avoid the single points of failure of high end
hardware. HP's older "Proliant Server Packs" and their ability to
completely mishandle the Broadcom network drivers on RHEL and CentOS,
in particular, come to mind.