Going to be One Of Those Days

Wed Sep 15 10:20:53 PDT 2004

I used to be a huge Sun supporter. Unfortunately, times have changed and 
Sun has not. At least not for the better.

Guy B. Purcell wrote:

>
> I'm not so sure.  I'd _love_ to see a real study done that takes into 
> account all the relevant factors (or as close to that as is 
> practical)--including extra HW required for remote reboot, and extra 
> sysadmin time to assemble the ultra-cheap build-it-yourself boxes, and 
> to replace cheap HW as it dies under stress, etc..
>
> At $CURRENT_JOB, we "upgraded" from sturdy-but-old SPARC boxes to 
> Intel HW from Sun.  The HW wasn't any cheaper than similar SPARC boxes 
> (V60x's vs. V210's), and it has held up well under load so far, but 
> also has required almost $1,000 extra in manageable power strips, the 
> OS support ($BOSS requires OS support) fees are more than they were 
> for Solaris

We skip the off the shelf stuff and stick with feature rich servers like 
HP's DL series. It gives us more manageability than Sun offers on most 
of their servers and we have far fewer problems than we do with the 
SPARC servers. The built in iLo card allows you to use a browser, ssh, 
or conserver to get to the console. From that same console you can power 
off the server, reboot it whatever. And they've been rock solid.

I agree RedHat's (or whoever's) fees are too high.

> , and I had to add the optional bits (second CPU, second disk, more 
> RAM--stuff my VAR should have done, if I had a decent one; don't 
> ask--we can't switch) to each one (a significant time cost for around 
> 40 boxes).

You might want to find  a new VAR. Sun actually has a nice little trick 
they've been pulling lately that is even worse than that. We ordered a 
server that came with 512MB DIMMs by default. We ordered a memory config 
that required 1GB DIMMs. Did they install them? Nope. They shipped us 
both but with an RMA box so that after we installed the 1GB DIMMs 
ourselves we had to then ship the original memory back to them.

> We originally went with much cheaper Intel HW, but it broke seriously 
> under load, so decided that "you get what you pay for" is somewhat 
> close to correct.  I have this uncomfortable feeling that that adage 
> is deeper than typically interpreted, and that "cheap" HW ends up 
> costing the same as or more than the "expensive" stuff in the long run.
>
> -Guy
>
Good x86 boxes aren't really much cheaper than say SPARC anymore but you 
get way more bang for the buck. I would definitely not call Sun's 
hardware reliable. At least not the CPU's. We had another one go 
yesterday. But performance-wise we have some jobs that run on dual proc 
Intel boxes that are about 3x faster than on a 280R. With the Opteron 
that's jumped to 5x in some cases. That's huge.

Also Sun's hardware is so dated. A V880 comes with 7 - 33Mhz PCI slots. 
Wow. How about some ISA slots since you're being so generous? I work for 
a SAN company so we may have higher requirements ( we use lots of dual 
ported HBA's) but all Intel hardware has PCI-x slots these days. And for 
my final hardware gripe, have you ever tried to push a Gig link on a 
Solaris box? Shamefully even Windows is much better.

So basically we're all going to be forced down the x86 path if we care 
about any sort of performance because the old server architectures are 
just that - old.