koffiejunkie
Executive Member
Yes true didnt think of the HP's and the Dell's, the picture is very different with them involved. But Intel dominates the OEM side, and a huge share of the branded market too..
Intel's current server boards (5000 series) are quite nice actually.. and if you're going to run an embedded raid controller regardless of the make of board, then suffer the consequences, but atleast the option is there..
I'm not just talking about their onboard stuff (re: the quality). Both the controllers mentioned are available as add-on cards.
They have a 6-port SATA-RAID card - can't remember the model but it's an LSI Megaraid 150-6 card that they simply stick in an intel branded package - they didn't even put an intel skin over the firmware interface - just changed the POST messages. This card (both the LSI and 'Intel' variants performs like an absolute dog, much worse than software raid.
The Marvel chip I've seen on Intel branded PCI cards as well. From what I've read several firmware and driver updates have improved these chips very much, but they still are no match for the kind of server card that you pay about R1000 for - the type that should be built onto a server board costing R5000.
If I was going to build a server with Intel CPUs in I'd look at someone like Tyan to supply the motherboard.
With regards to Dell and HP, the servers I'm referring to are HP DL385 G2 Opteron based and Dell PowerEdge 2950 Xeon based. Because we buy so many we get to specify configurations not available on their website, so in our case we have identical evertything except just about the chassis, boards and PCUs. We don't use dedicated network controllers (more for the specific features we want than anything else), dedicated RAID cards, the same discs and RAM, etc.
The problem with benchmarks is they are written to be 100% optimised the the hardware they'll benchmark, while most software that ends up rinning on servers in real world situations are not not even written properly for running at all, let alone specific hardware. In the web and application hosting business, the vast majority of developers write horrible code, that do horrible things to the hardware. Add to the mix that most servers gets used in a shared configuration, you can get an idea of what can happen. In these *real world* applications, the Opeteron server simply handle the load much better than the Intel boxes. They just cope better...