[geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[dave at cca.org]

avriettea at speakeasy.net writes:

>retail, netras are $3000. we get 40% off that, for various reasons. so 
>we could get 208.33 netras for that price. they come with two 100mbit 
>nic's. youre telling me that your z800 is more cost effective? i just 
>cant see it. i _know_ it hasnt got 208 cpu's... i _know_ it hasnt got 
>416 disks... i _know_ it hasnt got 416 nic's....

Those are silly comparisons. The question is how much data can
it move. Once you get into their price range, mainframes are always
better for moving large amounts of data.

>there are situations when a mainframe is the way to go. web serving is 
>not one of them.

The web hosting company I use had 5 T3s & an OC3 the last time I
checked.  I think they host somewhere around 90,000 sites.  I suspect
they would have been better off with a mainframe than with their
current network of servers. 

Considering that net services tends to be a spikey load, running more
servers on one shared machine will make better use of resources.

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org ------
-------- "I prefer the ridiculous to the sublime." - James Chance ---------