that’s whacked

time for a new grommit

Wednesday, Oct 3. 2007  –  Category: Computers

So it looks like grommit is both overloaded (starting to hit some higher load averages) and out of space. Doh.

I started shopping around for machines; I think I’ve found some pretty good 1U quad core Intel boxes with enough storage to keep me happy. I looked pretty longingly at the x4150, but I think I’m going to have to end up going with a whitebox system for a few reasons.

grommit’s biggest limiting factor is its storage. I need gobs of storage…. as much as I can pack into 1U. The best bang for the buck here looks to be a 1U chassis with 4xSATA drives. I can populate initially with 2×750 Seagate ES drives and have the other two bays for future expansion. The x4150 looks nice, especially with the 8 SAS drives, but as benr pointed out recently, the 2.5″ SAS drives are only at 176GB right now. I’d need at least 4 of them to meet grommit’s current requirements which rapidly prices me out of the ~$2k I was hoping to spend on a new grommit machine.

Colfax has a pretty nice 1U Quad-core Intel Xeon box (Supermicro board) with 4xSATA bays (with the 2x750GB Seagate drives) and 4GB of memory for $2100 which looks pretty tempting. I think it’d run Solaris pretty well; wouldn’t have the sexy Sun look – but well, it’s going into a datacentre – so who cares.