[YLUG] Server purchase

[simon at principia.demon.co.uk]

richard at richardclegg.org wrote:
> I wonder if I could get the advice of the massed ranks of the group for 
> two things here.  I'm trying to get a high-availability server going 
> within the dept of Mathematics here at York. 
[snip]
  See what HP are offering - I spec their machines (specifically ProLiant DL380 and DL360 servers) in the clusters that I build and the systems we've sold so far with HP hardware have been rock-solid stable. Not cheap, but you get what you pay for.
  Vital statistics of the machines we use:

Master nodes: 2x3.4GHz Xeons, 4Gb RAM, 5x146Gb U320 disks (RAID-5) - RAID 
              controller is a CompaqS SmartArray and I had no problems getting it
              to work with Gentoo.
Slave nodes:  2x3.4GHz Xeons, 4Gb RAM, 2x146Gb U320 disks (RAID-0)

A set consisting of master + 4 slaves cost us around 20 grand, but reducing the size of the disks and cutting back the RAM will bring the price down considerably. HP's support is pretty good as well - we had a failure on one of our development machines and they had someone out to fix the problem within a few hours.

Simon