Re: Nice server board for AMD64/EM64T?

["Nicholas P. Mueller" <nmueller@restechservices.net>]

I would also recommend this board (the K8SR S2881).  We have used  
them in Tyan 1U barebone kits for an asterisk phone server, a mail  
server, a router and a few other capacities.  They are very high  
quality with no problems.  Be forewarned - Opterons utilize ECC 
+Registered RAM.  We bought Kingston 1GB (2x512) kits to use, which  
also opens up the dual-channel fun.  One kit per processor also opens  
up NUMA so each processor can access RAM directly, though you may not  
want or need so much RAM.

These boards come with Silicon Image SATA controllers.  If you (the  
original messenger) have a 0.9TB RAID currently, maybe you could  
migrate to a four disk RAID 5 and save some money and hassle with so  
many disks and the hardware RAID.  I only mention it b/c with up to  
four processing cores (2x dual core), the disk overhead is  
potentially a very minimal portion of your overall processing power.   
Throw in that RAID card only if you need to later.

In terms of a good RAID card to use, I have had success using the  
very new Tekram/Areca cards.  Very high quality, PCIe or PCI-X, but  
expensive.  Or you could cheap out and get a Promise SX8 (PCI-X) and  
use software RAID some more.

Having so much processing power available with multi-core Opterons, I  
really hesitate to go and blow extra money on hardware RAID with  
features I barely use.

Nicholas P. Mueller

On Nov 23, 2005, at 9:35 AM, Soenke von Stamm wrote:

> Tyan Thunder K8SR S2881. I have one of them running under Linux in  
> a high load
> mail server for months now without any problems. Using Opteron 248s  
> (bought
> it when those were the 2nd fastest Optis). Chipset is also AMD,  
> long in
> production, very reliable. NICs: two Broadcom BCM5704C, GBit.
> Plus we have close to 20 of them running under W* with two Opteron  
> 265s.
> Stable as can be. They eat every Intel offering in every respect -  
> power
> draw, performance, price.
>
> The board starts at €404, this ones is for 1U with only two slots.  
> There are
> almost identical boards with more slots like Thunder K8SD Pro  
> S2882. I found
> this one for only €370, -D version is recommended as it supports  
> DualCore (I
> think the non-D have disappered from the market).
>
> For SATA RAID, I use LSI MegaRAID SATA 300-8X, becuase 3ware 95xx  
> doesn't fit
> into the Tyan 1U chassis (too long with SATA cables connected). The  
> LSI so
> far runs perfectly (kernel > 2.6.11 needed) so far, but only for  
> some weeks
> by now.
>
>
> Sönke