[CLUE-Talk] Truth stranger than fiction

[David Anselmi]

Jeff,

I've been thinking about the price/performance ratios of big Sun boxes compared to
little Intel boxes.  1) below is obviously false, 2) is (or should be) irrelevant,
but 3) I don't know about.  I think a good Solaris SA would have no trouble
running a Linux box (what's the most Solaris like distro?), but I would defer to a
SA as to how much trouble it would be.

However, doesn't Solaris run on Intel?  Couldn't you do your clustering with
Solaris as well as Linux?  We share a big Sun box for development at work, but I
would guess that for half the price, one Intel server per developer would give us
better performance.

Does anyone know how to compare an E450 (say) to a group of PCs?  I'd be
interested to do a comparison here.

Dave

Jeffery Cann wrote:

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> Greetings.
>
> Last year at S&P, we developers proposed a Linux cluster to solve a
> processing problem.  We had a bunch of parallel java processes that the magic
> Sun boxes (4 and 8 way Sun ES servers) could not handle.
>
> So, we took the java processes and ran them on 8 NT developer workstations.
> The piddly 8 NT boxes (mix of P2 and P3 boxes with avg of 128 MB of RAM
> (compared to the 2 GB for the Sun box) trashed the performance of the Sun
> box.  We didn't want a cluster of NT boxes, due to the obvious problems of
> constant reboots, so we suggested Linux.
>
> Being a 'Solaris Shop' (our parent company, McGraw-Hill has a 'strategic
> partnership' with Sun), our proposal was dismissed for the following reasons:
>
> 1.  Linux is not supported. -- i.e., whom would we call when Linux would fail.
> 2.  We have a heavy investment in Solaris
> 3.  We would have to retrain our SAs to Linux
>
> We gave examples of massively parallel Linux clusters (mostly Beowulf) like
> in Sandia National Labs (New Mexico) and still no sway.  Mind you, the ES box
> we run costs over 100K (I don't know how much we pay for 24x7x365 'support')
> and we could have built an 8 node Beowulf cluster on Linux for about 1/4 of
> the price.
>
> Now, I read that Google.com, our favorite internet search engine, uses about
> 8000 RHAT Linux boxes to serve up web pages.  Interesting approach to
> scalability:
>
> http://www.internetweek.com/shared/printableArticle?doc_id=INW20010427S0010
>
> I guess we developers aren't so insane, after all.  Google's use of Linux
> would not have changed the decision at S&P -- there is way too much money
> changing hands between S&P and Sun, but it adds to the legitimacy of Linux as
> an 'enterprize' solution.
>
> Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
>
> Jeff
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