Hum. “Ironic Design”:http://ironicdesign.com/ runs several machines. We’ve got seven servers for servicing “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/, plus three or four others doing miscellaneous duties, like hosting this blog.
Anyway, having all this hardware that we pretty much keep going 24/7, and especially with the AnteSpam servers, which get driven hard (2 emails per second, which doesn’t sounds like a lot until you consider that means 20x that in various database lookups and inserts (for logging) plus, oh yeah, actually running “SpamAssassin”:http://spamassassin.apache.org/) means we have some fairly strong ideas about hardware.
Our current systems are all Opteron-based (though we’ve not made the jump to 64-bit mode yet) with “Tyan”:http://www.tyan.com/. Our storage controllers are all “3ware”:http://3ware.com/ and our drives are all WD Raptors–not, honestly, that I love WD, but I like the 10K performance.
And our ram is all “Crucial”:http://www.crucial.com/. And, for the forseeable future, it will stay crucial, because so far our one experiment with another vendor, Gigaram, has really sucked. We’ve had two pieces of our very nice ECC ram fail–and one of them we tried in another machine, and it failed there, too.
Now I don’t want to make blanket assertions off of relatively little data, but I will note that it’s going to take a long time for us to consider going back to Gigaram, because we take our uptime pretty seriously, and they’ve had an adverse impact.
