Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

[deleted]

> In my case, it comes down to two words: remote
administration ... HP is
> the only system I've yet found that has it integrated
as part of the
> hardware ...

You will also find hardware integrated remote administration
inside
IBM and Sun machines. They both run off residual power. So
as long as
a single power supply module has electricity in it, you have
access to
your machine via a CLI on a seperate IP. Even if the machine
is
powered-off. Sun even offers remote dial in over a modem
onto their
administration module. It's very good and I've been very
happy with it
over the years, both with IBM and Sun. But I can't say as
much as the
Dell admin module...


> The other selling point for me on HP was the 2.5"
SAS drives ... our new
> servers have 4x72G SAS drives in a 1U space, which
means I can do RAID1+0

SAS drives are coming in strong. It's what all new machines
will have
in the server market in upcoming years. Just take a look at
new
machines from Sun, IBM and HP, they all switched to SAS
drives.
They're great, really. But so far I've yet to see 15K rpm
in 2,5" SAS
form factor.

David

-- 
David Robillard
david.robillardgmail.com
Montreal: +1 514 966 0122
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On 6/29/06, David Robillard <david.robillardgmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The other selling point for me on HP was the
2.5" SAS drives ... our new
> > servers have 4x72G SAS drives in a 1U space, which
means I can do RAID1+0
>
> SAS drives are coming in strong. It's what all new
machines will have
> in the server market in upcoming years. Just take a
look at new
> machines from Sun, IBM and HP, they all switched to SAS
drives.
> They're great, really. But so far I've yet to see 15K
rpm in 2,5" SAS
> form factor.

 I'm talking out of my mouth here but maybe the extra
storage density
used in SAS compensates for the lack of 15K rpm.

-- 
Joao Barros
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On 6/29/06, Joao Barros <joao.barrosgmail.com> wrote:

> > SAS drives are coming in strong. It's what all
new machines will have
> > in the server market in upcoming years. Just take
a look at new
> > machines from Sun, IBM and HP, they all switched
to SAS drives.
> > They're great, really. But so far I've yet to
see 15K rpm in 2,5" SAS
> > form factor.
>
>  I'm talking out of my mouth here but maybe the extra
storage density
> used in SAS compensates for the lack of 15K rpm.

Well, there are two issues here: access time (rpm) and
storage
capacity (GB). The access time deals with rotational speed
of the
drives (rpm) while storage capacity (GB) does not care how
fast the
drive spins.

The 15K rpm drives are nice to use when your application
needs very
fast access to your storage. On a busy mail server or
database for
instance. You won't need 15K rpm drives in a DNS server for
example.

As for storage capacity, it's not really that important for
the SAS
drives because you really don't need 72GB disks to install
a UNIX
operating system such as FreeBSD   But it's
still good to have the
extra space for your application.

But anyway, if you really need storage space, then a SAN is
your best
bet (assuming you can afford it, of course) EMC, Hitachi and
StorageTek include so much cache (~256GB) in their boxes
that the
rotational speed of the drives is not that important in the
end
because most read/write operations are to/from this cache.
Then again,
your problem here is that FreeBSD is not supported by those
machines.

-- 
David Robillard
david.robillardgmail.com
Montreal: +1 514 966 0122
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On 6/29/06, David Robillard <david.robillardgmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/29/06, Joao Barros <joao.barrosgmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > SAS drives are coming in strong. It's what
all new machines will have
> > > in the server market in upcoming years. Just
take a look at new
> > > machines from Sun, IBM and HP, they all
switched to SAS drives.
> > > They're great, really. But so far I've yet
to see 15K rpm in 2,5" SAS
> > > form factor.
> >
> >  I'm talking out of my mouth here but maybe the
extra storage density
> > used in SAS compensates for the lack of 15K rpm.

Correction, it looks like the 15K rpm SAS drives finally
exist.
Hitachi has some:
http://www.hitachigst.com/por
tal/site/en/menuitem.191a33649dd96d1d92b86b31bac4f0a0/

Cheers!

David

-- 
David Robillard
david.robillardgmail.com
Montreal: +1 514 966 0122
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On Jun 29, 2006, at 8:41 AM, David Robillard wrote:

> Well, there are two issues here: access time (rpm) and
storage
> capacity (GB). The access time deals with rotational
speed of the
> drives (rpm) while storage capacity (GB) does not care
how fast the
> drive spins.

There is a third and that is bit density.   The reason that
that is  
important is that it can compensate for a slower drive
(rotational  
speed).  If a fast drive with lower bit density has to
rotate X  
rotation to get to the data, a higher bit density drive will
usually  
have to rotate something less than X because the data is
more dense.   
In simple terms (these numbers are made up to illustrate
this and  
have no bearing on real numbers except that the concept
holds:  a  
fast RPM with lower bit density might have 1GB per cylinder
and hence  
say 2/3 of a rotation might be needed to get data X.  A
higher  
density drive might have 6GB per cylinder so needs only, say
1/9 of a  
slower rotation to get to the same data).   This was amply  
illustrated by some 500GB SATA benchmark I read that had it
equaling  
some much faster RPM drives for access time with much lower
bit  
density.  Other factors play in here as well but hopefully
you get  
the idea.

Chad

---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
Your Web App and Email hosting provider
chad at shire.net



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