I have worked with many x86 servers including the major vendors like HP/Compaq, IBM and Dell. I like the HP servers mostly for the best management tools and the ease of drivers installation (especially on windows). When Sun just started to ship AMD based servers I bought one 1U server for test and as a cheap x64 test machine. It was a very bad design and I had a lot of HW problems. I discovered, the hard way, that Sun was not ready with people to support the servers.
Recently I had a chance to see the servers on MySQL conference and was very impressed. So when I needed couple of 4 sockets servers I decided to buy x4440. Those are 2U machines with up to 4 quad or dual AMD CPUs, 128Gb RAM max,8 disk drives and 4 on board NICs. HP has DL585 G5 but it is 4U and has only 2 onboard NIC. All the “main stream” operating systems are supported. I’m planning to run Ubuntu 8.04 on them. The installation of Ubuntu was smooth. Unfortunately none of the hardware vendors support Ubuntu and I had to compile Adaptec management services and tools. I think it is important since this is the only way to know if any of the disks in the raid failed.
Since I’m planning to run MySQL on the servers, I did some sysbench tests and the results are impressive.
Overall I think Sun has has a good product.
Tags: HW
