[geeks] Disney going to HP Linux for animation

[geeks at sunhelp.org]

I do love Sun, but if my only exposure to Sun was through Netra's, I
wouldn't feel the same way (disclaimer: I've only worked with T1's,
apparently there are others). Our experience has been that what we do with
UNIX boxes is far too heavy for Netra's. We use E450's (webservers) through
E4500's (database). Our Netra's are for DNS mostly.

As for the mainframe, we've had that discussion. There are some people here
who can't see the benefits, they only see the huge cash outlay. We even
wrote the proposal showing reduction in datacenter costs due to space
savings and cost-justified it all, but still no. It was also mentioned by
one person that "its only one machine - where's the redundancy". I almost
shit pineapples with that one (he's a managerial type, totally
non-technical). Most of these dotcomsmonaughts have never been in mainframe
shops and have no idea what redundancy and uptime really means.

Instead we buy redundant expensive load balancers, redundant expensive
mega-switches and lots of boxes. We pay lots of money for rackspace and
power. A mainframe wouldn't be much cheaper, but it would be much simpler.

Actually, I do work with a lot of very smart people who do great work.
Unfortunatly, only myself, one other net engineer and a systems engineer who
quit have ever been in mainframe environs. The Internet Generation saw
small/light/cheap as the answer to the worlds ills and the benefits of a
mainframe seem foreign to them. They DO understand what we've said about
them, but I think they just don't trust MF's enough to believe it.

~ -----Original Message-----
~ From: Joshua D Boyd [mailto:jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu]
~ 
~ Why not an IBM mainframe or a rack of netras?
~ 
~ -- 
~ Joshua D. Boyd
~ _______________________________________________
~ GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks
~