> Something like a Sun Ultra-20/X2100? These use a > fairly generic Opteron-based > motherboard with the familiar all-in-one I/O chipset. > The product differentiation > omes in the form factor, service processor, high > quality power supplies, > expandability, etc.
Yes, or the X4100. I believe there's even an employee discount available. However, I've heard too many of those running on people's desks, as well as in the lab, and they're too noisy for where I want to put them. But that's certainly the direct, obvious way to get a system known to run Solaris! (Also they support 2.5", not 3.5" drives, and not enough of them). > I presume you are sizing based on GBytes. If so, > then the stores are now full > of 750 GByte disks and the 160/250 GByte drives are > on clearance. I believe we're currently under 300GB total in use in the household (though I've got a couple of 300GB drives in use; one is all backups and one isn't full). Yeah, I *could* configure a RAID-Z pool of 3x750GB as my starting configuration, but...seems excessive somehow. > I have noticed that finding ECC memory in a retail > store is almost impossible. > If you absolutely require ECC (and as a RAS guy, I > highly recommend it) then > you may need to purchase from a systems vendor or > online. I certainly haven't found it in the store, but I can find it easily enough for internet order, so no big problem. I mostly build my own systems, or re-build them, so I'll probably end up doing this one that way; well, unless I end up buying an Infrant ReadyNAS instead, which *does* support adding drives to an X-RAID group. > > And of course it's for a home server, so I'd like > > to buy it for about $1.98. > > Okay, so I'm going to have to give a little on this > > one. I'm actually able > > to talk about more like $2000 for a > > single-processor system with 2GB RAM and > > say 4x250GB disks plus a boot disk, though it hurts > > me to say so. > > The RAM may chew up a third of the budget, because of > the ECC requirement. Ouch; but I don't think so, I thought I was seeing prices in the range of $110 for a 1GB stick of ECC registered DDR400, which is what that Supermicro says it takes. Now, I may end up wanting rather more than 2GB eventually perhaps. I think ECC is a necessity for a system with a couple-few GB of ram that runs 24/7 and stores important data. Similarly, one of my big pushes to ZFS is the block checksumming; should greatly reduce undetected bit-rot. Those "< 1 undetected error in 10^14 bits" error rates are testable in relatively few days on my current desktop system, there really needs to be some higher-level error checking. > Also this week, I noticed that the HCL is falling > behind. There are many > systems which will work that aren't listed. The > problem is that a motherboard > design has about a 6 month market window. Rather > than worry about specific > boards, look for the chipset. Hint: Sun tends to > make systems using the > NVidia chipsets and graphics cards. Ah; useful point. I haven't really looked at what's inside Sun's x86 servers too carefully. I recognize the short market window as a problem; but was hoping people reporting success would help. I wish there were a way to report *failure*, too. > What I've seen this week is: a number of new, > relatively inexpensive > motherboards with AM2 sockets, NVidia NForce 430 > chipset (4xSATA, 2x IDE, GbE, > hdaudio, USB, firewire). If you need more SATA, then > the Marvell 88SX and > SiliconImage 3124/3132 SATA are well supported by > Solaris <wink wink> Ah, *very* useful. Add-on SATA is pretty likely to figure in this process. > For the processor, I recommend dual core, the > difference is noticeable. > But if the budget is tight, you can start with the > inexpensive Sempron64 > and upgrade it later. Whatever you get, make sure it > is 64-bit, it will > make life easier. Also, AMD is expected to reduce > processor prices later > this month. I'll almost certainly go dual core, and I'd *like* to go dual processor as well. Because I'm currently running two servers, which *aren't* handling disk for the household, just web and email. I want to consolidate all that onto this one box if I can. (They're currently dual processor *pentium pro* systems, so anything I buy today will have 10 times the power of the two put together). Less noise and less heat and better disk handling and better performance. All I have to do is learn to be a Solaris admin again (last time I did much with it was around 1997, I think; since then my various jobs, including my current job at Sun, have used Linux). It looks to me like I can get the Supermicro box I mentioned, with processor, memory, and disks, in my $2k range. So even if that exact one won't run Solaris, there should be other choices; Supermicro is not going to be a magically unbeatable price point, I'm thinking. Knowing what SATA controllers will work helps a great deal. Does the OS interact with the hot-swap rack at all, or does it just notice the device on the end of the SAAT cable is gone? Is that yet another thing I have to worry about compatibility on? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
