Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:11:05 -0400 From: "Jim Stapleton" <stapleton.41@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dell vs. Silicon Mechanics vs. FreeBSD Systems Message-ID: <80f4f2b20604260911va92f11er9576b9b19fe22e4c@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4993f7e10604260733t168451f6n52c260a9889ae3f0@mail.gmail.com> References: <4993f7e10604260733t168451f6n52c260a9889ae3f0@mail.gmail.com>
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I can't answer this too well unfortunately, but I can give you a bit of in= fo. Dell does not carry AMD, and probably will not for a long time. However they do have AMD64 compatable Intel chips, which are better at bandwidth, though not as good for calculations. Dell treats their business customers nicely, but can be rather unpleasant to individuals not within a sizeable group. I had good experiences with Penguin Computing at a previous job, and their supports was good, but unfortunately, they are a mostly-linux group. They do have good support and AMD systems though. IBM is also a very nice choice, and I am pretty sure they have AMD servers, as well as the AMD64 compatable Intel counterparts. Although slightly more expensive than Dell, I definetly prefer IBM. I've no experience with Silicon Mechanics. > I've had bad experiences in the past with onboard SATA and/or RAID > controllers from Silicon Mechanics but it looks now like their > Rackform nServ A206 uses an Adaptec SATA controller and an Adaptec > RAID controller (this will do RAID1, right?) Probably, Adaptec makes pretty good stuff, and tends to aim towards the features/performance market, rather than the low-budget market. Silicon mechanics gives the model number of the card, so you can go here to read the specs: http://www.adaptec.com/ then go to the faq, linked to at http://www.freebsd.org/ and find out the compatability level of the hardware. I think the OpenLDAP thing with AMD64 is fixed (I had some apps that required it, and they didn't complain), however Java is a pain to setup (I gave up and just installed the i386 FreeBSD). I hope this is helpful, -Jim
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