[OpenIndiana-discuss] Good enterprise hardware

[Wim van den Berge]

We're in the desert SW of the US. None of the major brands offer 4hr support
in our area for anything short of an arm, a leg and a major organ. In order
for us to guarantee availability of the 2.5PB+ of storage provided by about
10 ZFS servers we decided to go a completely different route. We built our
servers out of good commodity components. We went with SuperMicro for our
chassis, motherboards and JBODS, Kingston for memory, Seagate for drives,
LSI for HBA's, Intel for NIC's and STEC for SSD's. While some of the systems
differ in capacity and configuration they all consist of the same basic
building blocks. We keep two cold spares racked and ready to go and we have
a bare-metal images for all ZFS system available.

While we test our ability to swap a cold spare into place within 30 minutes
every six months, in the three years we've been running full production on
ZFS, we have never needed the spares.

W



-----Original Message-----
From: Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana) [mailto:openindiana at nedharvey.com] 
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2013 4:57 PM
To: 'openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org'
Subject: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Good enterprise hardware

I'm planning to build a ZFS storage server in the datacenter.  Mission
critical storage for virtualization, requiring hardware support, 24/7, 4hr,
sameday onsite.

I thought I was going with silicon mechanics, and just learned, that their
24/7 4hr sameday service is pointless - because they don't get parts to you.
You have to buy spare parts including memory and whatever else, but if
something like a motherboard or CPU dies, you still have to ship it back to
the depot.

My next thought is, obviously I can get some good hardware with good support
from oracle.  But I'd like to know what other alternatives there are.

Recommendations?
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