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Date:      Mon, 8 Jun 2009 11:56:35 -0600
From:      ericr <erobison@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   What server hardware are you buying from the big companies these  days?
Message-ID:  <7fc6c27a0906081056u161731c6m298efcf2aa471d38@mail.gmail.com>

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Hi,

I need to buy some new servers, and mgmt has decreed that we get them from
someplace which will provide service contracts with on-site h/w suppport,
which means HP, Dell, Sun, IBM, etc.

Has anyone bought servers from one of the big manufacturers lately and had
good luck with them?  It seems hard to get them to tell you what controllers
and chipsets they're using in servers, to compare against the supported
hardware list.

What I'm looking for isn't all that exotic:

rack mountable
RAID-5 controller
4-6 or more disks (hot swappable would be nice, but not mandatory)
dual power supplies (hot swappable would be nice, but not mandatory)
CDROM
2 ethernet ports
some RAM
a video card
an Intel or AMD CPU - single, two CPU, or multicore doesn't really matter.

and the all-important onsite service.

These things need to be pretty reliable, both of the data centers they're
going into are a couple  of hours from my house, so I don't want a dead
power supply to take out the server.  We've used SuperMicro's in the past,
and they've been wildly variable.  Some of them have run ok for years, some
died within weeks, and kept dying no matter what parts we put in. (yes, I
checked the power, it was clean.  My guess is just a bad run of
motherboards).  I've got 3 servers that have never been able to stay up for
more than a couple of days, we don't even use them.

Regardless, any one have suggestions on what current models of servers are
out there that run?

Thanks!

- ericr



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