[net-perf] another hardware suggestion

[Michael Sinatra]

At the HPR-TAC meeting, Mike VN told the group that he was able to push 
line rate gig using Dell 750s, and had determined that they would be 
suitable for the piPEs workshop.  I thought I'd also throw in the 
SunFire v20z as a candidate.

I just purchased the lowest-end SunFire v20z off the web.  In that 
configuration, it has a single Opteron 244 (1.8ghz, 64-bit), 1GB of RAM 
and two Broadcom Tigon-3 based gig ethernets.  In that configuration, it 
is MUCH faster than my home machine, a 3.2 gHz P4 with HYPE-r-threading, 
  and 1GB RAM at doing mundane tasks like compiling and installing software.

I added an intel e1000 dual gig card into one of the two PCI-X slots 
(one 66mhz, the other 133mhz) and was able to push each interface 
(Broadcom or Intel) at line rate using iperf, running under either 
FreeBSD/amd64 (5.4-STABLE) or Gentoo Linux/amd64 (kernel-2.11.5-web100). 
  I am impressed with the price/performance of this 1U box and the I/O 
throughput seems excellent just from anecdotal testing.  Oh, and it 
comes with a 73GB 10k scsi u320 disk, with an extra bay (and they give 
you the proper bezel in the empty bay).

The price of this box is $1995 (web special, not subject to educ 
discount).  If you want the educational discount, you have to start with 
list, which when coupled with the education discount, gets you back down 
to $2000.  Even so, that seems like a good price for a well-built 
Opteron system.

I make this suggestion in addition to, rather than instead of, the Dell 
suggestion.  It just another option, especially if you have any v20zs 
lying around that you might be able to use for this purpose.

michael