My only thought is if you can swing it financially, I would go with a 2xx series processor and a 940 series Mobo, which will give you the ability (if needed in the future) to drop in a second physical processor, just for starters. I also prefer the Supermicro Mobo's after researching and originally wanting Tyan (thunder in my case).
We just purchased a new database server for our sites with dual 265 opterons and a 15k SCSI RAID 10 set up. We are moving up from a dual 2.4 xeon with 10k SCSIs in RAID 5. I think we'll be extremely happy with the results from everything I have been reading about the opteron performance!
I'm very impressed! We are now fully on our new Opteron server and it is impressively fast! We had (2) dual xeon web servers, one for web & the other for data bases, and this single server absolutely blows them out of the water. My sites have never loaded so fast!
I'll probably do a full report on the move, specs, etc shortly.
Oh, and we're successfully running WHM / cPanel with 64bit CentOS. I'm just really happy and impressed and we have not even really optimized the server or migrated the databases to the /data hard drives. All of my forums are currently running with the OS on a pair of raid-1 drives. Things should be even quicker once the data is moved to the 4 15k SAS drives running raid-10.
If you like speed and performance, go Opteron & some fast drives and you will not regret it.
I'm very impressed! We are now fully on our new Opteron server and it is impressively fast! We had (2) dual xeon web servers, one for web & the other for data bases, and this single server absolutely blows them out of the water. My sites have never loaded so fast!
I'll probably do a full report on the move, specs, etc shortly.
Oh, and we're successfully running WHM / cPanel with 64bit CentOS. I'm just really happy and impressed and we have not even really optimized the server or migrated the databases to the /data hard drives. All of my forums are currently running with the OS on a pair of raid-1 drives. Things should be even quicker once the data is moved to the 4 15k SAS drives running raid-10.
If you like speed and performance, go Opteron & some fast drives and you will not regret it.
excellento!!!! glad to hear folks are discovering the power of dual opterons especially dual core dual opterons
excellento!!!! glad to hear folks are discovering the power of dual opterons especially dual core dual opterons
We now have a new HTML dual opteron server doing an excellent job and 4 dual core dual processors ones on order I'll let you know how we get on.
The reason we have our own servers is that, that way we can have the specification we need ie lots of memory and processor but relatively small fast SCSI disks.
Last year we purchases a couple of lower end dual Xeon machines which have turned out to be completly useless in comparison to the Opterons which in the same configuration are now cheaper.