[K12OSN] Just about ready to make a purchase

[Peter Scheie]

Coming in late in the discussion, I would pick the Opterons, for all the 
reasons mentioned.  Opterons have a more sophisticated memory controller 
architecture than Xeons.  Les is correct that Intel has again taken the 
lead with their Core 2 Duos, but I haven't seem much about those in 
servers yet and in a multi-user system, I think Opterons still have the 
advantage.

As to SCSI vs. SATA, choose SCSI.  Yes, SATA is getting close to SCSI in 
performance, particularly in single user boxes.  And it has a modest 
ability to reorder requests for optimal seek times.  But it's nothing 
like what SCSI disks can do, and this is particularly so in multi-user 
systems like an LTSP server where you'll have many people reading and 
writing to the disks.

Petre

Jim Kronebusch wrote:
>> Please take my advice with caution Jim as I have no personal
>> experience with any of this Dell hardware. I am just sharing my
>> opinion. If you decide on the 2900 please make sure it will work with
>> Linux. Check the MB chipset, NICs, HD controllers etc. Also I'm not
>> even sure if Linux kernel will work with quad core cpu's yet.
>> Please do your homework. Don't rely on my word.
> 
> I take all advice with caution :-)  The more I read, the more I am inclined to go with
> an Opteron server.  Dell makes a 6950 with quad dual core opterons, but it is in a 4U
> case so there is not as many options for internal drives.  However I do have an external
> PowerVault 220S that can handle 14 SCSI drives and is already populated with four 300GB
> drives.  I could run the OS on some smaller internal drives and run /home on the
> powervault or run them all in the powervault.  I will look more into this tonight.  I
> want to purchase everything within the next week or two, but I think the topics posted
> here merit a little more research.
> 
> Dell offers all of these servers with RedHat Linux AS.  So I would assume that the
> 64-bit K12LTSP would run fine on them.  I will put a call into Dell to verify.
> 
> Thanks again.
>