On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 04:51:22PM -0700, Marc Tooley wrote:
> 
> So I'm a staunch supporter of NetBSD in my capacity as network
> admin--everything I've used it with so far has been predictable,
> clean, and reliable.
> 
> Now someone's come to me with some pretty outlandish requirements..
> and I don't want to be forced into a platform I don't particularly
> like.
> 
> I was wondering if someone could suggest a hardware platform that
> NetBSD runs extremely well on.
> 
> Looking for pure, mind blowing power. I've read some about the alpha
> ports..they seem pretty solid in the literature.. an EV6 perhaps? Any
> specific recommended hardware for me?
> 
> Uptime on the hardware is fairly important, and it'll be doing large
> amounts of serving under heavy load. Woo!

I have an alpha ds20 here, running as a samba/NFS server under 1.5_ALPHA.
It has 20 SCSI disks on 4 ncr875 controllers (doing RAID-1), and a tigon II
gigabit ethernet.
With the siop scsi driver and raidframe I can unplug/replug one of the
disks without disturbing the machine.
It has been extremely stable since a couple of bugs in the filesystem
as been fixed. Before a power shutdown last week it had a uptime of
90 days.

For your requirements I think an alpha (maybe xp1000 but I don't think
the xp1000 has hot-swap drives) is the way to go. You can get something
as reliable with PC hardware, but for about the same cost :)

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
--