As per title really...looking at purchasing a server (again)

Dell options on the cards, but then since I'm doing ruby stuff and I'm a sucker for advertising (solaris is optimized for ruby???). So sun is targeting people again so I've been looking at the x2200 or a couple of 2100's, not that badly priced, yes more but...

Anybody use sun kit firstly who can point me to a good reseller, and secondly, if anybody just so happens to be able to find me an open lorry I'd be super appreciative.

I'm waiting for sun's uk essentials program to start up to compare hardware costs, but if I can get a better price than dell store

Anyhow here's to hoping

I can't point you at a good reseller but what sort of Lorry are you looking at as I may be able to help there

As for the dell kit, my job forbids me to make comment so read that how you will.

On the suggesting Sun front, is now a bad time to say told you so?

As a serious point, what about Solaris x86 so you can have a play with it before you splash out on the hardware?

Running an install in vm now for the x86, hopefully it will work after the leopard upgrade tonight...nothing like pouring rocket fuel on a fire.

Still renting this box, but rent's due so thinking again, current box is fine now the x220 would give it an extra processor shot in the arm and a fair bit more ram ceiling

Any lorry or van would do, figure of speech I picked up from Col G, he's a dell man.

We're a reseller amongst over things, but I think shifting one box wouldn't be looked at.

We've had mixed reviews on the x series boxs. We tend to stick to the V range really due to tried and tested SPARC.

What OS you looking at putting on the box ?

Well I've got 2 RH EL4's and 7 Ubuntu 6.10's, so the logical one would be ubuntu, but why buy a sun box As to shiping one, I understand, but one might become 9 in 6/12 months when we leave our current hosted arrangements

I was toying with a solaris / ngnix / php / rails / mysql stack.

TBH it was the concept of the sun startup packages and potential discounts that got me switched on. The SPARC stuff ,well I've never used it although enough processors should leave an x86 looking slow.

I'm totally open to suggestions, presently this server is a dual core xeon 1.86 so I was looking to up the cpu and double the processor count to cover me for 2 years at least...so open to SPARC equivilents etc...

The extra nic's are an option too as the dell stack tends to be one nic. The logic here is two smaller web and a medium db, so three in all, but that tripples my co-lo for similar outlay over one big box...that old chesnut. But agin in 6-12 I suspect I'll be co-lo'ing a half or full rack either in a dc or downstairs(office block) with a leased line.

oh and 8gb of ram atm.

hmmm, with something like Solaris 10 you could get one big box (x86 or SPARC) and zone it. You can then change resource assignments on the fly depending on load etc. Does co lo cost on a 6 U box cost the same as 3 2u boxes ?

Not quite linear, it's indexed of power consumption.

Roughly a normal 1u is 35 per month, assumes 1 processor. 80% of that is a power charge as space at this place is not an issue, ex american telco project aborted before arrival .

Ah the fun and games of speccing a box/boxes based on projected load etc. I think something like a V440 might be a bit out of you range then ?

Is the 8gb of ram used all on one box ?

I'm using 6Gb at the moment, mysql and apache pretty much run free. The extra 2gb is for rails applications, I've got one on ice for briskoda classified / freedom which is running at about 50k page requests a day with an avg of 12 queries per page, db core size is just on 1Gb at with indexes.

Rails has not got as much throughput as a seriously tuned php app yet (except maybe on lightty or ngnix) so presently performance is gained by proxying to many app servers each at about 60mb an instance, but it's getting better every month.

I'm certain a 2Gb dual core running ngnix or lightty/litespeed talking to a separate dual core db would suffice, but then it's two-n machines to harden and worry about

I'm also using mysql cluster on another project and that's being a pitfa compared to single sql nodes, but then should one dc disappear everything will carry on... although I'm beginning to prefer the idea of a 3am call once in a blue moon over lots of 8am arghhhhs

I'm totally open to suggestions, presently this server is a dual core xeon 1.86 so I was looking to up the cpu and double the processor count to cover me for 2 years at least...so open to SPARC equivilents etc...

Now what you really need, Col, is a zSeries Or maybe you'd get away with a nice pSeries

Chris

Server

I think this looks good but may be on the pricey side.

Now what you really need, Col, is a zSeries Or maybe you'd get away with a nice pSeries

Chris

naaa I started on s/38 for about a week so I'll settle for an i...lend me 50k? Or the keys to Hursley and a jcb Always loved that walk in the galileo.

But you know it will be there come hell or high water....but this x86 stuff is just so cheap, pile them high

Auroan,

How does a v210 (SUN V210 Dual 1GHz UltraSPARC IIIi Processor 2GB RAM 2x 73GB Hard Disk Drive ) Compare to the x86 stack? i.e. our present dell 1750's as above

Just trying to understand the v line up, it comes with sol 10, so it must have some poof.

If you have any marketing bumf on this stuff, and can release it, I'd be much obliged

Linux vs Solaris comparison of CDS performance does not read brilliantly unless the tco is reduced

How does a v210 (SUN V210 Dual 1GHz UltraSPARC IIIi Processor 2GB RAM 2x 73GB Hard Disk Drive ) Compare to the x86 stack? i.e. our present dell 1750's as above

We use a stack of V210s for our app servers (their dual 1.34Ghz tho), and they're absolutely solid, we don't have hardware issues and they're ridiculously stable...but the x86 stuff performs better (especially per £). No figures or benchmarks to try and quantify the difference tho...

Rob.

Auroan,

How does a v210 (SUN V210 Dual 1GHz UltraSPARC IIIi Processor 2GB RAM 2x 73GB Hard Disk Drive ) Compare to the x86 stack? i.e. our present dell 1750's as above

Just trying to understand the v line up, it comes with sol 10, so it must have some poof.

If you have any marketing bumf on this stuff, and can release it, I'd be much obliged

Linux vs Solaris comparison of CDS performance does not read brilliantly unless the tco is reduced

We only use the v210s as web servers on our staging environment. But on testing they could punch out about 20 page views a second more than the equiv x86 kit using the equiv software install. Problem is it's difficult to compare like for like, as the software has to be slightly different due to the core architecture.

I think you'll find the sun kit slightly cheaper on power consumption though.

We only use the v210s as web servers on our staging environment. But on testing they could punch out about 20 page views a second more than the equiv x86 kit using the equiv software install. Problem is it's difficult to compare like for like, as the software has to be slightly different due to the core architecture.

I think you'll find the sun kit slightly cheaper on power consumption though.

That pvps number of course depends on the app behind it. Here we get can get over 4k page/req's a second throughput on cached pages that are pure css no images and cached on disk...add a query or 10, images, no caching and that figure tumbles to

But you guys have given me some food for thought so I'm now running an install up ion an old athlon, will mock the environment and see how it goes.

So given the iceberg's are melting, should I stay clear of a Sun Enterprise 10000 E10K 64x Processor 64gb ram Server

If only I had a leasedline

1400 on ebay btw...now I'm not going to buy that, but out of interest from the sun experts above, how does that stack against modern kit really?

I suspect it would still out perform a couple if not more intel boxes?

1400 on ebay btw...now I'm not going to buy that, but out of interest from the sun experts above, how does that stack against modern kit really?

I suspect it would still out perform a couple if not more intel boxes?

You'd really have to have the usage pattern to match the performance advantages of the box...so if you had lots of low-resource concurrent processes it would probably be great.

We have a few old multi-processor SPARCs we use for internal development, and things like Tomcat and MySQL don't run especially well on them. I tried taking all but one of the processors offline on one box and then making the application requests (with no-one else using the server at all), and it runs at exactly the same pace. This makes me think the performance is due to the relatively low speed of the individual processors (or some other bottleneck)...

Rob.

So only good for folding then

So only good for folding then

Or as a front-end Apache/PHP server, and then put the DB on a hefty box... :rubchin:

Rob.

Ok this still exists as an option. MOre over since I've got our dc down to 30 quid a month for a back end box

So anybody know anybody that wants a really easy sale? X2200 or v equiv with linux, think I might be a bit optimisitic getting a v?

I think the X makes an excellent web server from some of the stuff we seen.

Have you thought about the PCIe IO capable low end blade replacement sun sell.

11u is 295 a month, so not got to thinking about that yet