Sun Fire X2100 -- nForce4 Ultra desktop chipset
Eugen Leitl
eugen at leitl.org
Sat Nov 26 20:52:43 UTC 2005
On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 04:40:32AM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 14:27 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > I'm thinking about ordering a Sun Fire X2100. Has anyone
> > here ran such a beast with Linux?
I've since found out that the beast runs Debian (and I presume,
RedHat FC4/RHEL4) just fine. I'll try Solaris Express (and something
based on OpenSolaris, eventually) as well, and run a few
benchmarks. The zfs and the zones are a nice touch.
> It's an nForce4 Ultra chipset, not worth the money IMHO. There are
I've used nForce4 Ultra in my other (home) RAID server, precisely because
it's a good performer, and inexpensive. So is the Sun Fire X2100 box,
I'm not aware of another barebone with this quality for
600 EUR.
> better 1U options IMHO. It only has PCIe. No PCI-X (if you want
> intelligent disk/redundancy).
The system has 2x GBit Ethernet, and in a pinch that PCIe
can take an IB or Myrinet adaptor. The redundancy can be
achieved with a distributed file system, or a AoE SATA
enclosure.
> I'm sure there are plenty of vendors/integrators on this list that can
> hook you up with a nForce Professional or Broadcom ServerWorks chipset
> server solution in 1U that is much better, for about the same cost.
I would be very interested in a list of alternatives, in about the
same price range (preferrably, with IPMI). I'm not aware of any.
> BTW, NCQ is fairly overrated IMHO. For single disks, it depends on how
I've since seen benchmarks which don't show more than 10% performance
increase in best case, so NCQ is not that important.
> well your OS flushes buffers. For multiple disks, you're now using your
> host to target multiple devices, and it would be far better for an
> intelligent host to control that (must like a real SCSI/SAS host does
> for its targets).
>
> The latest 3Ware 9550SX (PCI-X) and Areca 12xx (PCI-X or PCIe) series
> have on-board intelligence that handles multiple targeting of NCQ SATA
> devices. If you're really anal about NCQ, then you'll want to look to
> those cards. Both are supported in Linux.
>
> > and have you used >250 GB hard drives with the machine?
>
> Have a pair of WD 320GB drives on this very system (nForce4). There are
> no issues with supporting them at all.
I've gone with dual Hitachi Deskstar T7250s, which is a reasonable
approximation to an enterprise SATA drive.
> > (I've got bitten with Sun hardware lock-in once).
>
> These are standards-bsed AMD platforms. They even run Windows. Sun
> doesn't advertise that, but they do.
>
> > Is this hardware or software RAID?
>
> Software, of course! It's ATA FRAID (Fake RAID). 100% software driver,
> only 16-bit boot-time BIOS.
>
> Again, if you want intelligent hardware SATA raid with NCQ that works
> well under Linux, consider the 3Ware 9550SX (PCI-X) or Areca 12xx (PCI-X
> or PCIe).
Linux MD RAID device works adequately. We'll see how zfs compares.
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org
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