CentOS - Jul 2005 - Re: CentOS on Compaq Proliant Rackmount Servers -- whoa!

From: Tony Wicks <tonyw at tonyw.com>
> I run Centos on Compaq dl380g1/2/3's and Dell servers. While the
> Compaqs are strong hardware they are old and frankly the performance
> compared to modern (cheap or otherwise) hardware is not really that
> impressive. A dual 1 gig P3 dl380 and ultra 3 scsi drives get significantly
> out performed by a generic celeron with software raid SATA drives.
Whoa!

Who said U160 SCSI was faster than SATA?  That's a common farce!
In fact, it's the whole reason why SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is coming
about.  SAS can even use SATA drives.

I don't think that's is a good comparison at all.  You're changing
too many
variables.  Especially when you're comparing ultra-high density SATA drives
to typical, lower-density U160 SCSI drives.  Latency might be better, but
throughout is clearly not.

It all depends on your application.
> I firmly believe the best value for money and performance is the Dell
> Poweredge 750 with hardware raid SATA drives. The PE 750 is cheap
> and installs out of the box (Centos 3 and 4), performes flawlessly and
> is extremely fast.
Depends on the app, but you might be correct for many applications.

And, just because I'm curious, "hardware RAID SATA" by what
controller?



--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org

I'm not saying SATA is faster than anything, just that from experience I 
have seen that a Generic machine with a 2.3+ Celeron, Athalon or p4 with 
  SATA drives is much faster that an older Compaq with all the good 
drives etc. An example of this is that we had a quad 800mhz Xeon ML570, 
2gig RAM with a whole swag of scsi drives running RHEL 2.1 and Oracle. 
This machine ran Oracle queries at 1/2 the speed of my test server that 
was a 2.4 Celeron with a single 120 SATA and 1G RAM. The Dell 1750 (dual 
3.2 Xeon, 4G RAM, 3 x u320 146 in raid 5) that I replaced the ML570 with 
runs Oracle transactions around 10 times faster.

I personally run my own email on a dual 733 DL380g1 and it run's fine. 
But the point is, if you need any real processing power you might be 
better of buying one of the new generation of low end servers like the 
PE750.



Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org> wrote:
> From: Tony Wicks <tonyw at tonyw.com>
> 
>>I run Centos on Compaq dl380g1/2/3's and Dell servers. While the
>>Compaqs are strong hardware they are old and frankly the performance
>>compared to modern (cheap or otherwise) hardware is not really that
>>impressive. A dual 1 gig P3 dl380 and ultra 3 scsi drives get
significantly
>>out performed by a generic celeron with software raid SATA drives.
> 
> 
> Whoa!
> 
> Who said U160 SCSI was faster than SATA?  That's a common farce!
> In fact, it's the whole reason why SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is coming
> about.  SAS can even use SATA drives.
>