[Discuss] best dual core Linux box

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/18/2011 11:29 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
> 
> We are in the midst of licensing the SAS software product for a server.
> This is an extremely expensive product, and the charge for a quad-core
> machine is tens of thousands of dollars more than for a dual-core
> machine. If you are unfamiliar with SAS, it does lots of sequential I/O
> and is rarely CPU bound. So we are looking to put together a high
> performance machine that uses only a dual-core processor. I know that
> dual-core is now usually very low-end (or laptop) but creative
> suggestions are welcome. Ideally we would like PCI-e slots for SAS or
> SATA controllers so that we can have a lot of fast local storage.

Would it be out of the question performance-wise to just get a good
modern quad-core, and run SAS in a single-core bare-bones VM?  I haven't
done any benchmarking of disk-IO intensive loads within VMs, so I don't
really know what the overhead is (everyone seems to care much more about
the CPU-usage overhead).

Matt