[geeks] Input on server upgrade

[Phil Stracchino]

My main server is a 3U rackmount box with 12 SATA hot-swap bays
connected to two LSI SAS-3080X controllers on a Tyan i7320 board with
two Nocona-core P4 Xeon 3.2GHz processors and maximum RAM of 16GB.
Right now it's only got 4GB in it, and I'm looking at maxing out that
RAM.  But ... I'm also pondering that the machine could stand to have a
substantial amount more CPU than it does (it's not really fast enough to
keep up with RAIDZ3), and it'd be nice to be able to fit more than 16GB
of RAM.  So the other possibility is to put a new, more modern board
into the server.

If I go that route, I'd prefer to have AMD processors, want to have at
least 4-8 cores, and one way or another (whether onboard or via add-in
SATA/SAS cards) I need to have at least 14 JBOD SATA ports compatible
with Solaris 10 (two for boot, 12 for the array; the optical drive will
of course be so rarely used that PATA will be OK).  It'd be nice to also
have U320 SCSI for my LTO2 drive, currently attached to one of my V210s.

Anyone who's built similar machines have any specific suggestions?

The existing board is CEB form factor, I understand.  I don't know for
sure which server board form factors the existing case will actually
accept.  I need to try to figure out who made the case so that I can
find that information.  I'd kind of like to continue using the existing
case if I can, as it's a pretty nice case (3U with 12 hot-swap SATA bays
and 3 redundant power supplies).


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
  Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, SQL wrangler, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.