zfs discuss - Mar 2012 - Good tower server for around 1,250 USD?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I''m thinking about spending around 1,250 USD for a tower format (desk
side)
server with RAM but without disks. I''d like to have 16G ECC RAM as a
minimum and ideally 2 or 3 times that amount and I''d like for the case
to
have room for at least 6 drives, more would be better but not essential. I
want to run Solaris 10 and possibly upgrade to Solaris 11 if I like
it. Right now I have nothing to run Solaris 11 on and I know Solaris 10 well
enough to know it will do what I want.

This will be a do-everything machine. I will use it for development, hosting
various apps in zones (web, file server, mail server etc.) and running other
systems (like a Solaris 11 test system) in VirtualBox. Ultimately I would
like to put it under Solaris support so I am looking for something
officially approved. The problem is there are so many systems on the HCL I
don''t know where to begin. One of the Supermicro super workstations
looks
good and I know they have good a reputation but Dell has better sales
channels where I live and I could get one of those or even an HP more easily
than a Supermicro as far as I know. I will be checking more on this.

I have a bunch of white box systems but I don''t know anybody capable of
building a server grade box so I''m probably going to buy off the shelf.

Can anybody tell me is what I am looking for going to be available at this
price point and if not, what should I expect to pay? If you have experience
with any of the commodity server towers good or bad with Solaris and ZFS
I''d
like to hear your opinions. I am refraining for asking for advice on drives
because I see the list has a few thousand posts archived on this topic and
until I go over some of those I don''t want to ask about that subject
just
yet. Thanks for the help.

On Thu, 22 Mar 2012, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky
wrote:
>
> This will be a do-everything machine. I will use it for development,
hosting
> various apps in zones (web, file server, mail server etc.) and running
other
> systems (like a Solaris 11 test system) in VirtualBox. Ultimately I would
> like to put it under Solaris support so I am looking for something
> officially approved. The problem is there are so many systems on the HCL I
> don''t know where to begin. One of the Supermicro super
workstations looks
Almost all of the systems listed on the HCL are defunct and no longer 
purchasable except for on the used market.  Obtaining an "approved" 
system seems very difficult. In spite of this, Solaris runs very well 
on many non-approved modern systems.

I don''t know what that means as far as the ability to purchase Solaris 
"support".

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

well
use component of x4170m2 as example you will be ok
intel cpu
lsi sas controller non raid
sas 72rpm hdd
my 2c

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 22, 2012, at 14:41, Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at
simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2012, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky wrote:
>> 
>> This will be a do-everything machine. I will use it for development,
hosting
>> various apps in zones (web, file server, mail server etc.) and running
other
>> systems (like a Solaris 11 test system) in VirtualBox. Ultimately I
would
>> like to put it under Solaris support so I am looking for something
>> officially approved. The problem is there are so many systems on the
HCL I
>> don''t know where to begin. One of the Supermicro super
workstations looks
> 
> Almost all of the systems listed on the HCL are defunct and no longer
purchasable except for on the used market.  Obtaining an "approved"
system seems very difficult. In spite of this, Solaris runs very well on many
non-approved modern systems.
> 
> I don''t know what that means as far as the ability to purchase
Solaris "support".
> 
> Bob
> -- 
> Bob Friesenhahn
> bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us,
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
> GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss

On Thu, Mar 22 at 18:30, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky
wrote:
>Ladies and Gentlemen,
>
>I''m thinking about spending around 1,250 USD for a tower format
(desk side)
>server with RAM but without disks. I''d like to have 16G ECC RAM as
a
>minimum and ideally 2 or 3 times that amount and I''d like for the
case to
>have room for at least 6 drives, more would be better but not essential. I
>want to run Solaris 10 and possibly upgrade to Solaris 11 if I like
>it. Right now I have nothing to run Solaris 11 on and I know Solaris 10 well
>enough to know it will do what I want.
>
>This will be a do-everything machine. I will use it for development, hosting
>various apps in zones (web, file server, mail server etc.) and running other
>systems (like a Solaris 11 test system) in VirtualBox. Ultimately I would
>like to put it under Solaris support so I am looking for something
>officially approved. The problem is there are so many systems on the HCL I
>don''t know where to begin. One of the Supermicro super workstations
looks
>good and I know they have good a reputation but Dell has better sales
>channels where I live and I could get one of those or even an HP more easily
>than a Supermicro as far as I know. I will be checking more on this.
>
>I have a bunch of white box systems but I don''t know anybody
capable of
>building a server grade box so I''m probably going to buy off the
shelf.
>
>Can anybody tell me is what I am looking for going to be available at this
>price point and if not, what should I expect to pay? If you have experience
>with any of the commodity server towers good or bad with Solaris and ZFS
I''d
>like to hear your opinions. I am refraining for asking for advice on drives
>because I see the list has a few thousand posts archived on this topic and
>until I go over some of those I don''t want to ask about that
subject just
>yet. Thanks for the help.
Most of the supermicro stuff works great for me.


-- 
Eric D. Mudama
edmudama at bounceswoosh.org

Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2012, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky wrote:
> >
> > This will be a do-everything machine. I will use it for development,
hosting
> > various apps in zones (web, file server, mail server etc.) and running
other
> > systems (like a Solaris 11 test system) in VirtualBox. Ultimately I
would
> > like to put it under Solaris support so I am looking for something
> > officially approved. The problem is there are so many systems on the
HCL I
> > don''t know where to begin. One of the Supermicro super
workstations looks
> 
> Almost all of the systems listed on the HCL are defunct and no longer 
> purchasable except for on the used market.
In my third world country some of these are still found new in box and sold
at "just released" prices. I''m surprised to hear about the
state of the HCL,
but that is good info to be aware of. Why aren''t they maintaining it?
If you
can find a system can you at least depend on their statement that they
support it? Or is even that unknown? I would think if somebody buys a 5 year
old new server based on them showing Premier support available and then they
refuse to support it there would be the possibility of interesting legal
action.
> Obtaining an "approved" system seems very difficult.
Because of the list being out of date and so the systems are no longer
available, or because systems available now don''t show up on the list?
> In spite of this, Solaris runs very well on many non-approved modern
> systems.
Yes, I have entitlements from Sun so I am running an Update 8 box on a
custom build with no problems. It wasn''t built for Solaris or ZFS but
works
great. After reading the horror stories on the list I don''t want to
take a
chance and buy the wrong machine and then have ZFS fail or Oracle tell me
they don''t support the machine.

Thanks for your post.

On Fri Mar 23 at 10:06:12 2012 laotsao at gmail.com wrote:
> well
> use component of x4170m2 as example you will be ok
> intel cpu
> lsi sas controller non raid
> sas 72rpm hdd
> my 2c
That sounds too vague to be useful unless I could afford an X4170M2. I
can''t build a custom box and I don''t have the resources to go
over the parts
list and order something with the same components. Thanks though.

well
check  this link

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=SunFireX4270M2server&p2=&p3=&p4=&sc=ocom_x86_SunFireX4270M2server&tz=-4:00

you may not like the price



Sent from my iPad

On Mar 23, 2012, at 17:16, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John
Blutarsky<bluto at nymph.paranoici.org> wrote:
> On Fri Mar 23 at 10:06:12 2012 laotsao at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> well
>> use component of x4170m2 as example you will be ok
>> intel cpu
>> lsi sas controller non raid
>> sas 72rpm hdd
>> my 2c
> 
> That sounds too vague to be useful unless I could afford an X4170M2. I
> can''t build a custom box and I don''t have the resources
to go over the parts
> list and order something with the same components. Thanks though.
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky
wrote:
>
>> Obtaining an "approved" system seems very difficult.
>
> Because of the list being out of date and so the systems are no longer
> available, or because systems available now don''t show up on the
list?
Sun was slow to update the list and it is not clear if Oracle updates 
the list at all.
> great. After reading the horror stories on the list I don''t want
to take a
> chance and buy the wrong machine and then have ZFS fail or Oracle tell me
> they don''t support the machine.
I can''t answer for Oracle.  There may be a chicken-and-egg problem 
since Oracle might not want to answer speculative questions but might 
be more concrete if you have a system in hand.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

2012-03-24 2:02, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky wrote:
>>
>>> Obtaining an "approved" system seems very difficult.
>>
>> Because of the list being out of date and so the systems are no longer
>> available, or because systems available now don''t show up on
the list?
>
> Sun was slow to update the list and it is not clear if Oracle updates
> the list at all.
>
>> great. After reading the horror stories on the list I don''t
want to
>> take a
>> chance and buy the wrong machine and then have ZFS fail or Oracle tell
me
>> they don''t support the machine.
>
> I can''t answer for Oracle. There may be a chicken-and-egg problem
since
> Oracle might not want to answer speculative questions but might be more
> concrete if you have a system in hand.
I think it is just not interesting for Oracle to support
random 3rd party systems - and this is my personal speculation
based on news articles and stories and "screams" on forums
from ex-Sun customers and small partners driven out of business
by Oracle''s different priorities in different areas - systems
support, sunray deployments, messaging/portal infrastructures -
you name it.

For over a year there was even a problem to just buy Oracle''s
Sun products - the salespeople in remaining Oracle partners or
in Oracle offices could not point to a position in a price
list and state how much something costs, or if it is on sale
anymore.

Oracle tries to take place as a systems company. A big systems
company. They cut off many small-server product lines which
had little margin - and we really liked those smaller ones
with low price and excellent remote manageability. According
to rumours, they did not prolong Solaris support agreements
with other hardware vendors such as HP (or Dell?) which Sun
had for a while. Why bother supporting something cooked
out-of-the-house?

Oracle seems interested in selling their customers the whole
stack - rack, servers, software - and maintaining it themselves,
reaping the high profits and selling support year after year.
If this does not fit a particular customer''s vision or budget -
then begone, nasty poor people!

Well, this is their right. They bought it. And we others
have to play along.

So, I think, in the near future there will be no actual HCL
for Solaris support on non-Oracle branded hardware. You might
buy Solaris OS support on your third-party systems, I heard
it is around $1000 per socket (per year?) for smaller systems
and maybe more for larger systems, and Oracle might inquire
what other systems you have - so they might bargain to get
more out of you ;) Possibly this might also be done to see
if your hardware is supportable and if they want to sign
the deal.

I guess if they do sell you support, they might be feeling a bit
obliged to help with your OS problems. At least if the bugs you
find make it higher up in their internal invisible bug tracker.
At least that was the way in Sun days - most problems had to
get "economical justification" for higher managenent to assign
paid-for resources to its solution (consultants, analysts,
coders - whoever).

But I wouldn''t expect that they''d conjure up drivers for your
specific hardware or something like that, if it is different
from what they support today. That''s more likely to happen
in opensourced systems by porting from BSD, etc. into Solaris
and/or OpenSolaris-derivate systems, without any guarantees.
Many 3rd-party network drivers are available as such projects.

So, I think, an old Solaris HCL might be okay for things to
"just work". Whether anyone will officially support that -
is a different matter. Google up the specific components
like disk and network controllers to see if their drivers
were not obsoleted in recent years of OpenSolaris development.
Some older hardware has indeed lost support because nobody
used or sold it for ages, and driver models evolved and
changed, and nobody rewrote a new driver for a particular
piece of old junk ;)

Alternatively, dive into an open-sourced system like illumos
and its OpenIndiana distribution. I''m not sure that you''ll
have any better support either, but the code is open so you
can (hire someone to) solve your particular problems.
And there''s some activity in the mailing list to ask away :)

You might also revise Nexenta HCL, they might do a better
job at maintaining (and testing) current hardware lists
that are known to work (and be officially supported) with
their OpenSolars-based storage OS distribution. Since they
play a big role in illumos, their known-good HCL might be
quite relevant for OpenIndiana users in general, I think :)

Good luck, really!
//Jim

This is a very nice chasis IMHO for a desktop machine:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/743/SC743TQ-865-SQ.cfm

I use it for my workstation at work. Supermicro makes very high quality 
chasis. I got this for under $300 USD when I bought mine. You can also 
get rails and take off its feet and it can double as a 4u rackmount case 
which is cool as well. Will take EATX (server boards) and 8 hot swap 
disks with SATA/SAS backplain.

Very quiet and keeps disks cool. My drives in normal office temp are 34C 
coolest and 36C hottest so very reasonable temps. I use it with an X8DTH 
motherboard and 24 GB of ram and 6 core xeon CPU. Also dual gtx 260 
video cards (to drive my 3 monitors that need four DVI links to run).

Only during long periods of gaming would the machine ramp up its PSU fan 
(and actually get what I would consider not extremely quiet) and was 
otherwise nearly silent during regular usage.

On 03/22/2012 11:30 AM, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky 
wrote:
> Ladies and Gentlemen,
>
> I''m thinking about spending around 1,250 USD for a tower format
(desk side)
> server with RAM but without disks. I''d like to have 16G ECC RAM as
a
> minimum and ideally 2 or 3 times that amount and I''d like for the
case to
> have room for at least 6 drives, more would be better but not essential. I
> want to run Solaris 10 and possibly upgrade to Solaris 11 if I like
> it. Right now I have nothing to run Solaris 11 on and I know Solaris 10
well
> enough to know it will do what I want.
>
> This will be a do-everything machine. I will use it for development,
hosting
> various apps in zones (web, file server, mail server etc.) and running
other
> systems (like a Solaris 11 test system) in VirtualBox. Ultimately I would
> like to put it under Solaris support so I am looking for something
> officially approved. The problem is there are so many systems on the HCL I
> don''t know where to begin. One of the Supermicro super
workstations looks
> good and I know they have good a reputation but Dell has better sales
> channels where I live and I could get one of those or even an HP more
easily
> than a Supermicro as far as I know. I will be checking more on this.
>
> I have a bunch of white box systems but I don''t know anybody
capable of
> building a server grade box so I''m probably going to buy off the
shelf.
>
> Can anybody tell me is what I am looking for going to be available at this
> price point and if not, what should I expect to pay? If you have experience
> with any of the commodity server towers good or bad with Solaris and ZFS
I''d
> like to hear your opinions. I am refraining for asking for advice on drives
> because I see the list has a few thousand posts archived on this topic and
> until I go over some of those I don''t want to ask about that
subject just
> yet. Thanks for the help.
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>

On Sat, 24 Mar 2012, Sandon Van Ness wrote:
> This is a very nice chasis IMHO for a desktop machine:
>
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/743/SC743TQ-865-SQ.cfm
I own the same chassis.  However, when the system was delivered, it 
was quite loud.  The problem was isolated to using the crummy fans 
that Intel provided with the CPUs.  By replacing the Intel fans with 
better quality fans, now the system is whisper quiet.

My system has two 6-core Xeons (E5649) with 48GB of RAM.

It is able to run OpenIndiana quite well but is being used to run 
Linux as a desktop system.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

laotsu said:
> well check  this link
>
>
https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=3DSunFireX4270M2server&p2=3D&p>
3=3D&p4=3D&sc=3Docom_x86_SunFireX4270M2server&tz=3D-4:00
>
> you may not like the price
Hahahah! Thanks for the laugh. The dual 10Gbe PCI card breaks my budget.
I''m
not going to try to configure a server and see how much it costs...

I can''t even get to the site from my country btw. I had to use a proxy
through my company in America to get pricing. Oracle doesn''t want to
sell
certain things everywhere or they don''t know how to run a website.

In message <alpine.GSO.2.01.1203221338170.23749 at
freddy.simplesystems.org>, Bob
Friesenhahn writes:
>Almost all of the systems listed on the HCL are defunct and no longer 
>purchasable except for on the used market.  Obtaining an
"approved"
>system seems very difficult. In spite of this, Solaris runs very well 
>on many non-approved modern systems.
<URL:http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/hcl/data/s11ga/systems/views/nonoracle_systems_all_results.mfg.page1.html>
>I don''t know what that means as far as the ability to purchase
Solaris
>"support".
I believe it must pass the HCTS before Oracle will support
Solaris running on third-party hardware.
<URL:http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/hcl/hcts/index.html>

John
groenveld at acm.org

On 3/24/2012 4:54 PM, The Honorable Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky
wrote:
> laotsu said:
>
>> well check  this link
>>
>>
https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=3DSunFireX4270M2server&p2=3D&p>>
3=3D&p4=3D&sc=3Docom_x86_SunFireX4270M2server&tz=3D-4:00
>>
>> you may not like the price
> Hahahah! Thanks for the laugh. The dual 10Gbe PCI card breaks my budget.
I''m
> not going to try to configure a server and see how much it costs...
>
> I can''t even get to the site from my country btw. I had to use a
proxy
> through my company in America to get pricing. Oracle doesn''t want
to sell
> certain things everywhere or they don''t know how to run a website.
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
I posted this awhile ago when people were asking for a good recommendation.

I suggest pretty much any of the IBM stuff - the vast majority of them 
seem to have real good compatibility (excepting the ServeRAID 
controllers) with Solaris/IllumOS.  The baseboard controllers are 
usually some flavor of well-supported SATA or LSI SAS controller. 
They''re otherwise quite well put together, and parts are easy to come
by
(and, IBM''s support site for information is fabulous, even if you
DON''T
have a contract).  You can get reconditioned/used stuff for real check, 
and it''s even possible to get support for IBM-label stuff if
it''s not
out of warranty (or, buy a new warranty, if you so want, from your local 
IBM reseller, of which there are a lot, world-wide).  You can also 
likely get a Solaris contract for this, either through IBM or through 
Oracle (that is, if Oracle hasn''t completely stopped selling support 
contracts for Solaris for non-Oracle hardware already).

I personally own an X3500, which uses E5[1,3]00-series CPUs (dual or 
quad-core) and DDR2 RAM.  They usually come with a systems management 
card (or you can get one for cheap, under $50).  Parts are easy to come 
by, cheap, and covered by any IBM warranty if you buy a IBM-labeled part 
(even if it was a 3rd party, non-"authorized" reseller that sold you
the
part).

The X3500 and X3500 M2, plus the X3400 or X3400 M2 are likely your best 
bets.

The IBM Xref for Withdrawn Hardware is an excellent place to start to 
look for a compatible system (plus give you the IBM part numbers for 
everything):

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redpxref.html

Here''s what you want for under $1000:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-x3500-Tower-2x-Quad-Core-2-66GHz-8GB-4x73GB-8K-Raid-/140730930501?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item20c4379545


Cheaper, and better CPU, but smaller:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-x3400-M3-737942U-5U-Tower-Entry-level-Server-Intel-Xeon-E5507-2-26-GHz-/390390337076?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item5ae513ce34


-Erik

In message <4F7571DE.7080800 at netdemons.com>, Erik Trimble
writes:
>Oracle (that is, if Oracle hasn''t completely stopped selling
support
>contracts for Solaris for non-Oracle hardware already).
Still available on Oracle Store:
<URL:https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:product:2091882785479247::NO:RP,6:P6_LPI:27242443094470222098916>

John
groenveld at acm.org