-logic raid-controller) and found it to be a very nice machine.
>
> But again, they also offer (the same?) Broadcom networking on board.
> Just like Dell and HP. And it is a LSI Logic sas-controller on board,
so
> if FBSD has trouble with either of those, its hard to find anything
> suitable at all in the market.
>
You may want to search the bsd -stable and -hardware archives for
confirmation on this, but I believe the RAID/SAS issues have been fixed
in -stable and 6.2-beta1. The bce0 driver appears to have been fixed
more recently, but it's looking like it'll be fixed for the next round
of beta testing.
With any hardware for a critical server, you need to ensure redundancy
(RAID, etc) and for a critical server, you probably want either an
automatic spare hd failover done by the RAID (the 2950 RAID can be
configured to do this) or an entire spare server/replication solution.
While x86 class dells aren't even in the same ballpark as say an IBM
iSeries/pSeries for reliability, I haven't found their more recent boxes
(2850, 2950) to be significantly worse than other vendors (HP might be a
little better, but it's still x86 class hardware).
HTH
- Bucky
