(OT) Stable Hardware with long availability

[Net Llama!]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Bill Campbell wrote:
> Does anybody have any recommendations for hardware, main boards, CPUs, NICs
> in particular, that's reliable, and there is some guarantee that it will be
> available for extended periods of time?
>
> It doesn't have to be the Latest & Greatest technology as we want to use it
> in Linux boxes for the SMB market that will be doing normal Internet
> services, e-mail, web, firewall, ... that probably wouldn't tax a 1GhZ
> Pentium processor, much less the high performance hardware commonly
> available today.
>
> We want to be able to do software updates from binary packages without
> having to worry about hardware compatibility issues (e.g.  the ``gmp'' math
> package, used by amavisd-new, compiled on Intel gives invalid instructions
> on AMD -- or perhaps vice-versa).
>
> I think there has to be some source of hardware of this type, if only for
> systems used in applications where entire systems need to be certified as a
> package (e.g. medical, aviation, etc.), and they can't be dealing with new
> CPUs and main boards every six months.

Just about any Tier 1 vendor (Dell, HP, IBM, etc) can provide 10+ years of 
support on their HW asuming that you are purchasing in very high volumes 
(where high means thousands of units).  Beyond that, I suspect that you're 
out of luck here.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                        netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand				http://netllama.linux-sxs.org