Our project needs to purchase a new server and because of our institute's current policy it has to be a Dell and it has to be running Fedora Core (FC2 is what they are currently using but will presumably move to FC3 sometime soon). Having considered budget and needs, we will most likely buy either a poweredge 2850 or 2800. Because we will have quite a bit of data that we need to store on the machine, we want to load the machine with 146GB drives and set the system up with either hardware or software raid5.

Now my questions: does anybody have comments on either system? Any recommendations about what RAID controller to get, backplane configuration, and so on? Since the system will have plenty of CPU power and RAM (6GB) I'm thinking that software may perform even better than hardware RAID as long as there is enough bandwidth on the RAID/SCSI controllers and PCI bus. Has anybody run benchmarks on similar systems?

Also, are people running these type of systems in 32 or 64-bit mode? Is there any penalty in running 32-bit applications with the 64-bit kernel?

TIA,

-- Alberto

I'll answer the stuff I can.

I have experience with the PE2650's with U160 and the PERC3 cards. I'm running RHEL3 on them, but FC2 or FC3 should work dandy. I'm not familiar with the 2850s, but it looks like the main difference is the PERC4. I have no idea if that will be an aacraid or megaraid controlled card, but this page should help.

Also -- If you have hardware raid like the ones that come in the PE2xx0s, use it. It's there to make your life easier, and it will.

Thanks for the info. After googling a bit more, it looks like the PERC4 line is a brand new controller and not all distros are happy with it (yet), especially when running in 64 bit mode.

BTW, I had seen the help page you link below, but it looks like it's not being kept up to date. There's nothing about fedora core distributions or 2.6.x kernels. I also checked the http://linux.dell.com pages and find the site not well organized. A couple of reports on FC installations on 2850s that I found from the forums were not too encouraging...

-- Alberto