[nycbug-talk] 1U Server Recommendations

[bruno]

Charles Sprickman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In the past one of the guys I've worked with has been pretty happy with 
> the boxed supermicro servers.  They're basically a SM server board in a 
> pretty decent chassis, so we order that, processors, memory, ZCR card 
> and drives.
> 
> However I'm a bit intrigued by all the new AMD 64-bit stuff.  Since the 
> next box will be doing a fair amount of Postgres work, that might be 
> helpful if only by allowing more RAM.  Also looking at the prices on 
> Xeon chips, AMD looks like a steal.
> 
> Supermicro doesn't offer any AMD stuff, so I'm looking for some general 
> recommendations.  We don't want any homemade beige-box stuff nor do we 
> want to pay a premium for someone else to put together some "it may work 
> with FreeBSD" beige-box stuff. :)
> 
> Suggestions?  Our budget is OK, but not huge.  We're frugal but not dumb.

For sure amd64 is the way to go, they are only a few hundred $$ more
than Intel. I recently had a pleasure to setup up a few SUN Opterons 
(V20z), although not with *BSD, but close enough. They boot OpenBSD fine 
(32 and 64 bit), so FreeBSD should work as well. Two scsi hot swap 
disks, easy to take off cover, two giga interfaces, LOM, serial, usb, 
u320 scsi. And fast, very fast. They are a bit loud it seems, there are 
many cooling fans inside, but that doesn't bother me at all. They could 
be a bit more costly, but in case you are interested, they are great.

Bruno
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