[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI

[Tim Cutts]

On 5 Apr 2009, at 6:32 pm, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 01:50:59PM -0500, Matt Lawrence wrote:
>> On Sat, 4 Apr 2009, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
>>
>>> Interesting. Since I'm stuck using Red Hat and IBM, I've been hit by
>>> this on a 10TB storage shelf. Red Hat will only offer me ext3 and  
>>> 8TB.
>>> IBM storage on a Megaraid card which handles the disks as one  
>>> physical
>>> volume
>>
>> I'm using CentOS and the centosplus repository includes kernels that
>> support xfs.  Still wind up installing to ext3, but big data  
>> filesystems
>> can easily be xfs.
>>
>
> Red Hat _only_ - support, you know :(
>
> Tim Cutts and the Sanger Inst. aren't enough to convince senior  
> management
> that Debian is workable, even though HP and IBM will both support it.

Hehe.  I'd be very worried if my reputation *were* considered big  
enough to swing that sort of decision.  :-)

But you know what really gets me is that so many companies we've dealt  
with don't officially support Debian or Ubuntu, but when you talk to  
their engineers, you discover that they do their actual development on  
it, and port to RHAS/SLES afterwards.

HP's support for Debian has been extremely good though, behind the  
scenes, even if it doesn't often make it through to the front desk.   
Large chunks of Debian's infrastructure are hosted in HP datacentres  
(notably in Fort Collins).  Sadly the support does not extend to their  
workstation product lines; getting Debian to run smoothly on their  
business desktops is a royal PITA.

Tim


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