At my company we started with Supermicro, but eventually became an HP shop. Nothing against Dell, their hardware seems decent enough, but if you're going to have a large installation, you end up spending a lot of time with Supermicro doing things like manually assembling and sizing rails, going through weirdness with their hardware RAID, poor remote hardware alerting and monitoring, and other quirks that will slow you down.
HP's Proliants have a very nice design which you do pay for. Though I've found the extra cost tends to pay for itself in the end. iLO2 (now iLO3) tends to work very well. It has an ssh and https interface out of the box. Extra licenses will get you extra features such as virtual cdrom and improved virtual console. You can find manuals on HP's site for literally everything. They have wonderful documentation. Their Proliant Service Pack integrates very well with a Linux environment providing plenty of hardware monitoring, logging and statistics. They also have a web tools (such as SIM) that do well in providing an all in one monitoring and configuration interface. My biggest gripes are is that it's difficult to get to the RAID configuration tool via the BIOS, though you can do quite a bit of raid configuration via the hpacucli tool, and their warranty support is extremely poor. If you buy extra support they supposedly treat you better. The brand supermicro makes me shudder from the many poor experiences I've had. Though I know the warranty support you get from them is minimal if any. -kz On Jan 14, 2011, at 9:11 AM, Roy McMorran wrote: > Greetings, > Apologies in advance if I'm covering old ground here. I'd swear I'd seen a > similar discussion recently but I haven't been able to find it in the > archives. Anyway... > > I'm seeking recommendations for x86 based servers. Historically we have been > a Sun shop, and although it's probably been 4+ years since I've bought any > SPARC-based hardware, I have purchased several of their Intel-based servers > over the past few years. Since Sun were swallowed up by Oracle their prices > have gone up (or should I say the discounts have evaporated) so it's time to > consider other vendors. > > Most recently we've used the Sun x4170 with the Nehalem processors, and I'm > probably looking for something similar (although perhaps with Westmere now). > I'll probably consider Dell and HP, but I will also look at 'white box' > vendors. I seem to remember hearing good things about Silicon Mechanics. > > Must-haves are console-over-LAN (command-line console preferred over KVM), > redundant power supplies, mirrored system disks. Disk space requirements are > minimal. FWIW these are going to be web servers running Apache httpd and/or > Tomcat. We'll be running RHEL. > > Thanks for any advice. > -- > Roy McMorran > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/
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