Jens Frank wrote:
1 CPU at 2.4GHZ P4. (They offer a cheaper Celeron, I'm not sure if the P4 is worth the extra money for webserving or not.)
The 2,6 GHz is 1$ cheaper. If you want to buy the same boxes for all purpose (squid+apache), I'd go for the faster CPU.
To be sure that I understand. For essentially the same price, you recommend a 2.6Ghz Celeron over a 2.4Ghz Pentium? That sounds fine to me, I just don't know how the differences between Celeron and Pentium affect performance for webserving.
The SM-1151SATA has non-ECC memory. Being used to ECC and even hot spare memory, I'm not comfortable with this. 2*1GB is what I'd use, too.
Can you elaborate on this? All my recent server purchases have been from Penguin, and they are always ECC memory, which costs more and performs less, but which is supposed to be more reliable. But is it really? How much more reliable? Or have I misunderstood the difference completely?
My new G5 uses non-ECC ram, and it seems to work just fine. I have had plenty of bad sticks of ECC ram in my life.
Would you consider the use of non-ECC ram to be a "deal killer" on the SM-1151SATA, or just something that's not quite ideal?
Remote management cards are really useful coping with crashed servers. It starts with being able to read the kernel panic message, being able to power off and on the server, and advanced ones being even able to insert a "virtual floppy" during booting (Remember the crash we had while trying to remotely update the kernel?). http://www.techland.co.uk/index/eric is a vendor-independent RMB. Compaq's ILO-boards are much more powerfull, though.
*nod* I'll look into these.
How does a remote management card compare to serial console redirection?
I couldn't find a price for that Eric card, what do remote server management cards cost, generally?
Keep in mind that we are going to have easy hands-on access to the servers, and we're going to be in a facility that's staffer 24x7 with free "remote hands" service for things like pushing a reset button and typing a few things on the console, sticking in a floppy, etc.
Just for clarity in case people dozed off during the boring bits above:
SATA 80GB RAID $1951 or $1579 depending on ram/processor SCSI 36GB RAID $2521 or $1749 depending on ram/processor
Strange that the difference is 600$ for one configuration and 170$ for the other.
I see a difference of $372 and $772. You're right, though, it is strange. (Oh, I see, you were differencing in the other direction, but either way, there is something odd here. I will study it to make sure I didn't make a mistake.)
Thinking of Squid, I'd rather spend the money for 2 Gigs of additional memory than for the faster disks. Memory should dramatically reduce I/O load on proxies. 2 additional GB are 762$.
And if this is non-ECC ram, then perhaps 2 additional GB are less than that from other vendors.
PS: Sorry if this became to long.
I want everyone to write things this long, it's the only way for us to really study this out. :-) I will read every word that everyone says, because I have a very strong responsibility to make wise purchases with other people's money.
--Jimbo