[lug] server spec

[Nate Duehr]

On Jun 8, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> I've had good luck with Intel motherboards, but most of my  
> experience has
> been with Supermicro.  They rock.  Personal preference here, but I  
> won't
> use AMD's CPUs.  I'd like to, but usually it means using other  
> chipsets on
> the board, which tend to have nowhere near as good support as the  
> Intel
> equivalents.

I've had two SuperMicro machines destroy themselves after the  
internal fans failed on their 1RU rackmount servers.

I love their machines, like Sean, but you MUST manually check the on- 
board internal fans in a 1RU rackmount case... the motherboards we  
had did not have any on-board fan monitoring... and probably had  
temperature monitoring, which wasn't set up.

The heat problems of 1RU are many, and I've seen other (better)  
machines like Dell, HP, and IBM machines all die untimely deaths  
without proper cooling in that form factor also.  Most of those  
machines use some kind of (really loud) squirrel cage fan setup --  
the SuperMicro's I've used had multiple little 1" fans, and they die  
off pretty quickly.  A couple of years, tops.   I guess the idea is  
that you can check them and if one has failed, the rest are still  
moving some air -- and if a big squirrel cage dies it takes the whole  
machine down... different philosophies.

1RU is just tough to cool off, no matter how you slice it.  I think  
overall for 1RU I like the Dell's... especially their support for  
dead hardware and semi-support of Linux drivers for most stuff... I  
say most because I've had problems with NIC cards in some Dell  
servers...

I also don't use (but would like to for price...) the AMD chipsets in  
servers.  Although I do have one server on a standard desktop  
motherboard with an old Athlon 3500MP that just keeps plugging  
away... but that's not the class of machine you're looking to build  
today.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com