new Supermicro server configuration May 12th, 2007
With all the price cuts on dual core CPU's these days, it doesn't make any sense to buy the old stuff anymore. Here's a new 1U server configuration I just deployed: Supermicro SuperServer 6015V-T 1U Dual Xeon Dempsey/Woodcrests/1333 SATA2 FB-Dimm New chassis, supports SATA II (our old config is Sata150) It also has 6 FB-DIMM slots for a max of 24Gb. Here's the breakdown: Chassis - 815 4x 1Gb Kingston - 616 1x Xeon Dempsey (dual-core 3.0Ghz) 2mb Cache per core - 206 2x Western Digital Ultrafast 74Gb 10,000RPM - 320 Total: $1957 (price before shipping) For better hardware monitoring we can add an IPMI management card for $67 (this would give us some predictive failure warnings for the power supply, and other hardware monitoring). *update - This does not yet work in Linux. If we wanted to add extra ram, we could go 6Gig for an extra $308. For an additional dual-core CPU, it would cost an extra $206. I used the new Ubuntu Dapper 6.06.1 server edition to install this bad boy. The install had one hiccup, I discovered that when using a Software RAID1 configuration (which I use on all my 1U SATA servers), Ubuntu would not boot unless /boot was the first raid array (/dev/md0), and / was the second (/dev/md1), and SWAP the 3rd (/dev/md2). Somthing to look out for, if you get a grub error when booting and it complains about the partition type being '0xfd'. Other than this minor issue, the Ubuntu kernel handled the new Intel chipset (Blackford VS) flawlessly! (Worth mentioning that the Debian Etch Installer, beta3 did not have driver support for the Gig Ethernet card.) Very powerful server! Also, Ubuntu server edition is a nice and clean install (barely any packages installed by default). Much props Ubuntu!