[Beowulf] File server dual opteron suggestions?

[Bruce Allen]

Just to throw my 2 cents worth into these discussions, I've recently taken 
delivery of 34 of the following machines, so around 200 TB total usable 
storage.  Cost is $6.7k each, so about $1200 per Terabyte.

The local disks exceed 200 MB/sec read/write speeds.  As NFS servers we 
can get about 100 MB/sec via one network port of 160 MB/sec via two ports 
in each box.

SuperMicro H8SSL-i motherboard

AMD Opteron 175 processor

2GB unbuffered ECC DDR-400 RAM in 2x1GB (Kingston KVR400X72C3A/1G)

AOC-LPIPMI-LANG IPMI card

AIC 16-bay hot swap SATA chassis with 3 hot swap power supplies 450W

16 x 400GB Western Digital RE2 disk drives

ARECA 1160 disk controller configured as RAID 6 with 14 + 2 and no hot 
spares. The disk controller is configured with one 16-disk RAID-6 set, and 
two logical volumes.  The first logical volume (20GB) hosts the OS, and 
the second logical volume (remaining disk space) is for data storage.

1GB Areca DIMM for disk controller

Battery Back Up (BBU) units for ARECA

CDROM + floppy