RE: RE: surprising result:8CPU Sun 3500 VS 4CPU Dell 6650

> -----Original Message-----
> And talking about that excellent High Avaliable
> feature like CPU/Memory corruption and the server still
> run

Maybe I should clarify. If you lose a memory module, the box will almost certainly reboot itself and come back up with the memory module taken offline. You can't suddenly have a chunk of memory disappear from the OS and the OS continue as if nothing happened. I think the same thing is true for sudden CPU failure.

What I have actually seen, with my own eyes, was a situation where a Sparc 4000 was put under a table and between two other computers where the flow of air through the 4000 was blocked. The box had 6 CPU's, as it began to overheat, it shutdown 4 of the CPU's. One could run the Symon tool on a remote box and see the CPU's in the color red on the pictures of the system boards.

On the low end of servers, the mainline Unix vendors (such as Sun) have chosen not to jump into the middle of the vicious competition there. But as you move to larger servers, I think you see that the boxes from vendors such as Sun become more and more competitve as the server size increases. So, no, my first choice for a 2-CPU box would probably not be a Sun. I haven't checked prices for a few months now, but the last time I checked, an 8-CPU Sun was fully competitive in pricing with an equivalent 8-Xeon Dell. Of course, pricing changes constantly so my info could be out of date now. And, when I checked pricing on the web sites, I was assuming that you could still count on a 20% discount off list price from a Sun reseller, since that was always the case in the past. Also, in the past, if you spent $1M in a year, you could buy directly from Sun for a 30% discount. I don't know if those discounts still work that way today.

One thing is for sure: There is certainly a lot to consider!

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Author: Stephen Lee
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