[geeks] Sun-HOWTO

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 09:09:10AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 09:41:00AM -0400, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > Easy.  He works in a sensible environment that wants to purchase one
> > computer, and 10 dozen xterms instead of wasting a machine on every tom
> > dick and harry.  What else would people do with a machine like
> > this? (Alright, I know, run Oracle or sendmail, etc, but one can still
> > hope for a return to when machines were big and terminals were just
> > terminals).
> 
> I would be *afraid* of a company that bought an E15K just to run Sun Rays
> off of... then, of course, I dont know what Sun runs theirs off of 
> internally..

What would be wrong with that?  Assuming that they had at least 288 sun
rays, it could be cost effective for a 72 proc machine.  Those machines
are 2 mill, right?  That is a cost of nearly $7k per sunray (not including
the sun ray itself which is another $1000 for the nicer ones, if I
correctly recall).  So, $8k per seat.  Doesn't sound so great, but think
of the savings in support costs.  You probably would need at least 20
people to support that number of PCs, at $40k per year, plus a lot of
server admins for the NT servers, but this way you might be able to get by
with 5 support staff.  Maybe.  Every number here is probably wrong, but I
would think it would be close enough to correct to support my point.  And
considering that most terminals aren't going to be using CPU power most of
the time, I bet you could probably get more like 1000 terminals per
SunFire (assuming the server software isn't doing anything really stupid).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd