| gabriel rosenkoetter on Sun, 9 Jun 2002 15:47:07 -0400 |
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On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 01:52:11PM -0400, Paul wrote: > (Forgive me for the Star Trek approach.) Better isn't always better > either. If someone time traveled into the future and brought back some > kind of organic, optical, super powerful server assembled atom by atom, > it wouldn't do us much good if we couldn't access it. Bringing back the > many of such devices would make the system usable maybe, but how would > we replace or repair components, assuming that they use replacable > components? I don't see how that's even slightly applicable to the question at hand. Sun, SGI, Apple hardware costs a little bit more, but it's hardly unique. Plenty of replacement parts are available, often available at extremely low cost. > Um, what is "FUD"? grappa:~% wtf fud FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt > Like I said, the people at UPenn told me about thier declining numbers > of SGI systems in favor of Linux PC's. Replacing workstation SGIs or server SGIs? There is a HUGE difference, and I can't believe that they would replace a server-class SGI successfully with PCs running Linux, no matter how many of them they bought. The cost of use and maintenance would kill you within two years. > The Burlington Coat Factory, where I used to work, was/is replacing > Sun servers with Linux PC's and placing Linux PC's in thier warehouses > and stores. (Of course, the company is extremely cheap, especially > when it comes to salary!) Here you say "servers". What servers do you mean? I'm certain that even one E450 (which have been out for, what, six, seven years now?) would compare favorably, both in performance and in long-term cost, with even a fairly large Beowulf cluster of shiny, new Intel boxes. Especially if your application requires intensive disk and network I/O (as I expect a retail chain's computer infrastructure would). > Every issue of Linux Journal has an article about the movie > industry adopting Linux for workstations and clusters. Of course it does. It's an evangelism magazine. What do movie industry magazines say? > And what are the people on this list running? All of NeXTStep, NetBSD, Irix, and Mac OS. But this is, again, not a relevant data point. This is a hobbiest list. At work, we use Windows 2000 for corporate infrastructure, Cisco and Intel hardware for networking, an OS/390 (on the mainframe) and Sun E450s and E3500s running Solaris 2.6-8 for the real application (databases and data warehousing), and RedHat Linux for processing and webserving. The Linux boxes could be running just about anything POSIX compliant, though (and really should be running something with a better NFS implementation, imho); all they really need to do is chug through Perl scripts and process DBs. The webserving we do where we do because it would be a waste of a Sun to dedicate it to that and it's easier to make Linux secure than it is Windows. > We could be. Just different classes of servers and workstations. PC > hardware is definately on the lower end. At least Linux and PC hardware > let us run servers without paying for the heavy weight equipment until > we require and can afford it. There exist server class Intel systems. But go do a price comparison between, say, a Compaq ML5x0 and, say, a Sun Ultra 60. (The latter is, in fact, a workstation machine, but I'm confident I could get better I/O performance out of it than I could out of the Compaq, OS irrelevant.) > I didn't quote that much, but I did respond. I said that just about all > of the PC hardware that I replace is due to the availability of new, > faster components low prices. Why do you feel the need to replace it, though? Was it really too slow? My Macs running NetBSD certainly don't seem too slow (though they're often less responsive than I'd like on the console, I'm not using them that way and have purposely set NetBSD's UBC up to work the right way for long-running daemon processes). -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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