On Wednesday 09 September 2009, Mayank wrote:
>  My first worries are about purchase of hardware for this project and
> I am pretty much stuck up as no major vendor except HP is providing support
> for Debian and pushing the idea of installing a unsupported OS to top
> management would not be an easy task as well.

Firstly distros have very little to do with the hardware. It's the kernel
which takes care.
Secondly you will have to list out your hardware requirements particularly if
its SAS or other specialised storage hardware. I am presuming the cpu is
Intel / AMD.
Thirdly you are pretty much up the creek with most of the specialised hardware
unless the internal components are COTS "unbranded" stuff. Software will be
the least of your issues after 3 years. Before that period anything works
anyway.
Fourthly if it's branded stuff check the SLAa very closely and compare costs.
Most of the time the money spent on branded stuff and SLAs is a total waste.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: Your organisation has technically sound hardware and sysadmins
around.

> Can I consider the
> report displayed by http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl as final and dump my idea of
> installation of Debian or will the lack of support for some of the drivers
> won't have much effect on functioning of my system. This is the question
> which is worrying me the most as of now, because I don't want my servers to
> hang up in middle of operations at later stage and it would be really nice
> if someone can help me out on this front.

Lack of support is usually endemic to graphics, sound and hardware raid.
On a server these are usually more a hindrance, consuming power unnecessarily.
Rarely it's the sata / network phy devices.

Also check out coreboot / linuxbios. If your motherboard is listed as
supported you dont have a worry in the world. This project gets rid of the
bios and has linux as the bios - ya you dont even require a disk.



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Rgds
JTD
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