Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center
On 2020-06-28 11:24, Miles Fidelman wrote:
On 6/28/20 3:16 AM, David Christensen wrote:
On 2020-06-26 11:34, echo test wrote:
I view Debian as the dominant enthusiast Linux distribution in the
USA.
Also pretty dominant in enterprise settings - particularly
universities. Still built primarily for use on servers. You find it
all over cluster configurations. Scratch a big data analysis cluster
and you'll likely as not find Debian.
I suspected as much, but haven't seen much news about academia or
clusters recently.
I view FreeBSD as the dominant free x86/x86_64 BSD/Unix server
distribution.
But... for servers, I'd guess that (open source) Ubuntu & CentOS are
probably a lot more common.
According to WikiPedia, Linux dominates. But, they don't break it down
by distribution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Public_servers_on_the_Internet
with hardwares like Dell EMC PowerEdge or Lenovo ThinkCenter which
seems to never mention that they support Debian. What kind of issues
can I
encounter with such hardwares except simple cases like having to install
missing drivers with some already available firmwares.
You're looking in the wrong place. Look at the Debian site, for the
list of supported hardware. Look at the installation documents for
driver installation (which is more an issue for peripheral support - is
there a driver for every device that you plan to install?).
I looked for certified hardware. Debian is not impressive:
https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Certification
FreeBSD is trying:
https://www.freebsd.org/commercial/hardware.html
Red Hat and Ubuntu have established programs:
https://catalog.redhat.com/
https://certification.ubuntu.com/
Note: I will need some RAID solution hard or soft.
"Enterprise" implies storage area networks. This requires hardware
(and support software).
No, it does not. Particularly in these days of converged hardware.
Okay.
RAID is easy - Debian supports a number of software RAID options, and
most motherboards support some form of hardware RAID (as to many
external drive enclosures).
Yes. I avoid them.
Sharing across nodes is easy, too - NFS.
I prefer Samba -- works with Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, macOS, and likely
more.
Now, if you want to get fancy, and talk about high-availability,
failover and such, things get a bit more baroque - we're talking things
like real-time replication (look at DRBD), and fancy file systems. And
things get really tough, if you have multiple sites. Red Hat has some
good solutions, out-of-the-box, and last time I looked, they were all
based on open source components - you could integrate those with CentOS,
and probably Debian - but it takes a lot of work.
Interesting.
David
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