RE: [cobalt-users] NEW Cobalt RaQ xtr

["Rodolfo J. Paiz \(E-mail\)" <rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'll be nice to you in this post. :)

> Other than the price ($4799 and $5999, respectively),
> what is everyone's general opinion? Some comments:

First off, that I can't afford one. :)

>  * why the move to the Pentium III over the AMD?

My speculation is that they had a Socket-7 board and discovered that the
K6-2 had good price/performance. Then, when choosing another platform,
for some reason they opted for the PIII over the Athlon Thunderbird.
Now, the Athlon is such a superior product to me (1.2 GHz for $300?
Wow...) that the only reason which pops to mind is again of motherboard
selection for some reason. But a motherboard with integrated video, dual
server network adapters, and perhaps integrated SCSI from Intel might
have pushed them in that direction.

>  * the configurations ship with 2 and 3 drives; are
>    these expressly for RAID, or is the idea to allow
>    up to 120GB of internal storage through an arry?

You can get up to four drives. RAID-0 is a stripe, where all will become
a single 120 GB array. RAID-1 is a mirror, for two drives only. RAID-5
will use striping but will reserve one drive for checksum information,
so you'll get the capacity of N-1 drives. With four 30 GB drives, you'd
get 90 GB useful. But the fault-tolerance and the striping make for a
great package if you can afford to dispense with the storage space from
the last drive. RAID 0+1 is truly wasteful but also quite safe. You take
two drives and stripe them, then you mirror that entire array.

I presume that you can forgo RAID altogether... but there's no real
reason to do so. You want one drive, use RAID-0. You want RAID-5 (the
best if you can do it), great. You want middle-of the road... go 0+1. Do
not go for straight RAID-0; after all this is a webhost and
uptime/reliability are always #1.

>  * BlueLinQ app delivery service -- seems like an
>    auto-update/install feature for .pkg files? No
>    offense to Cobalt, but we usually wait a week to
>    see how many people get burned with the latest
>    install, or if it gets pulled from the site...

Amen...

> Other than that, it looks like a nice machine, but I
> would have liked to see MySQL, servlets and JSP as some
> new features that are integrated for point/click install.

Amen as well...

--
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>