I would also recommend this board (the K8SR S2881). We have used
them in Tyan 1U barebone kits for an asterisk phone server, a mail
server, a router and a few other capacities. They are very high
quality with no problems. Be forewarned - Opterons utilize ECC
+Registered RAM. We bought Kingston 1GB (2x512) kits to use, which
also opens up the dual-channel fun. One kit per processor also opens
up NUMA so each processor can access RAM directly, though you may not
want or need so much RAM.
These boards come with Silicon Image SATA controllers. If you (the
original messenger) have a 0.9TB RAID currently, maybe you could
migrate to a four disk RAID 5 and save some money and hassle with so
many disks and the hardware RAID. I only mention it b/c with up to
four processing cores (2x dual core), the disk overhead is
potentially a very minimal portion of your overall processing power.
Throw in that RAID card only if you need to later.
In terms of a good RAID card to use, I have had success using the
very new Tekram/Areca cards. Very high quality, PCIe or PCI-X, but
expensive. Or you could cheap out and get a Promise SX8 (PCI-X) and
use software RAID some more.
Having so much processing power available with multi-core Opterons, I
really hesitate to go and blow extra money on hardware RAID with
features I barely use.
Nicholas P. Mueller
On Nov 23, 2005, at 9:35 AM, Soenke von Stamm wrote:
Tyan Thunder K8SR S2881. I have one of them running under Linux in
a high load
mail server for months now without any problems. Using Opteron 248s
(bought
it when those were the 2nd fastest Optis). Chipset is also AMD,
long in
production, very reliable. NICs: two Broadcom BCM5704C, GBit.
Plus we have close to 20 of them running under W* with two Opteron
265s.
Stable as can be. They eat every Intel offering in every respect -
power
draw, performance, price.
The board starts at €404, this ones is for 1U with only two slots.
There are
almost identical boards with more slots like Thunder K8SD Pro
S2882. I found
this one for only €370, -D version is recommended as it supports
DualCore (I
think the non-D have disappered from the market).
For SATA RAID, I use LSI MegaRAID SATA 300-8X, becuase 3ware 95xx
doesn't fit
into the Tyan 1U chassis (too long with SATA cables connected). The
LSI so
far runs perfectly (kernel > 2.6.11 needed) so far, but only for
some weeks
by now.
Sönke
