[OpenIndiana-discuss] hardware specs for illumos storage/virtualization server

[Paul B. Henson]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 10:17:30AM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

> I have a OpenIndiana system with 16-cores of Xeon E5 and Intel i350 
> Ethernet and these seem to work great with recent OpenIndiana/Illumos. 
> I was a bit nervous about i350 Ethernet since the driver was not added 
> until 151a3 but it has worked perfectly.

Sweet, thanks for the feedback.

> only $20-30).  Other than the SAS controller, there is not much extra 
> cost for SAS as compared with SATA if one sticks with a supplier like 
> Supermicro.  Due to this, I went with SAS for my system, except that 
> SATA is used for boot/system drives.

I was comparing near-line SAS to consumer SATA, you're right that
there's not much difference between enterprise SATA and near-line SAS, I'd
definitely go SAS if I was willing to pay that much for drives. Right
now I'm thinking I'll roll the dice on the WD Red's and see what
happens. Maybe I'll just get 3-4 at first and do some benchmarking. I'd
love to go SAS but I'm already so far out of budget <sigh>... I might
regret skimping on drives though.