Or so I think. I'll know more in a couple
of weeks when I get an account on one to play.

I never said Solaris on MF, I said we might
be consolidating a bunch of stuff from Linux
and Solaris boxes on a Linux partition on
the MF.

Here's da deal. I use 2 Sun 450s per client,
along with a 2TB Fibre based array, which
has 4 FC connection. I also use 2 to 4 Linux
compute servers.

Rather than deal with all that for each client,
wouldn't it be nice if we could buy a big
box MF to take care of it for lots of client.

But it's a total crock'o'shit. The MF would cost
at least 1,000,000, and I'd need to add disk
for each client anyway. The performance would
SUCK. I'd only get 1 (ya here that, 1!!!!)
piece of shit MF CPU. The disk IO would be
the same as we currently have, which is MAX about
80MB per second, with single file access hitting
about 10MB per second, as opposed to 300MB per
dual Sun/Xyratex array, and my IO gains every time
I add a client.

In order for me to hope to achive the performane
of $70,000 worth of Sun gear and $100,000 worth of
disk, I'd have to spend about $3,000,000 on the
MF. It would be INSANE!!!!!

So, I'll pitch my alternative:
[link|http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?catid=61163|http://store.sun.co...?catid=61163]

It's only $600,000. Cough cough.
It's got 12 CPUs (each twice as fast as current 450 CPUs)
and can grow to 24 CPUs. I assume each CPU added would be
about $5,000, so add $60,000, for a total of $660,000.
Which would be the equivelant of 48 450 cpus, which means
it will equal about 16 450s in power. Since each 450
costs me about $35,000, I've LOST money since 16 450s
will cost $525,000. But it is a LOT easier to manage
a single box, right? Also, since the 450s, aren't truly
utilized 100% of the time, they are wasted cycles since
I don't share them between clients. But peak performance
is important, since user wait time is the real measure of
performance, not total throughput. So individual peak
time would be GREAT, which would be a win, unless all clients
hit at once, which should allow at least decent performance,
because I wouldn't attempt to add more than a client per
2 CPUs. Except the perceived performance would SUCK for people
who are used to going solo but sometimes they start fighting
others. So I would artificially limit and given query
(except my own of course) to just a couple of CPUs anyway.


ARRGG!!!
I dunno.