Re: fujitsu-siemens primergy rx300 s2
On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 09:55:32PM +0100, dr.bob wrote:
> I need to set up one such machine as a Debian-based server. What would
> you recomend - going 64 bit with debian-amd64, or sticking to ia32?
> This is a rack server, nobody's going to use it as a desktop so I
> don't care about compat with openoffice etc., it will be doing dhcp,
> nfs, remote boot , .. for a farm of diskless workstations - so I'm
> mostly concerned about solid network operation and good support for
> the onboard RAID controller.
>
> nb. the box is descibed at
> http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/products/intel_servers/rack/primergy_rx300s2.html
Well my understanding so far from following this list is that the Xeon's
are typically a bit slower in 64bit mode than 32bit mode, although for
applications that need over 2 or 3GB ram for a single process the extra
memory probably outweights the slight slow down. The AMD chips seem to
run faster in 64bit mode in almost all cases. If you are just running a
bunch of smaller tasks and have intension of having more than 2 or 3GB
ram in the system, I suspect 32bit would make more sense on a Xeon
system.
As for support for that system, well you really have to find out what
chip/model that raid card is to find out if linux has drivers for it.
Since it lists redhat and suse there is at least a chance drivers exist
(sometimes binary only drivers exist only for a couple of specific
kernels from a couple of specific distributions).
Debian's support for amd64 systems is certainly not as mature as the
i386 release, but it looks rather good in general. I am not sure I
would run a production server on it yet, but then again I might
depending on how important downtime would be given the potential
benefits of running 64bit (which I personally would buy an Athlon
64/Opteron system for).
Len Sorensen
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