[geeks] Re: [rescue] Re: Sad end to SGI Power Challenge XL story

[Peter L. Wargo]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> > 1) Really cheap: SS1000 with 85MHz modules.  *great server*, and almost 10
> > years old.
> 
> I thought those looked like nice machines, but I didn't know that could pump
> that much data.  Not that I can currently afford anything that can pump that
> much data.

They are amazing systems.  We replaced a 4x50MHz SS1000 with a 4x200?
(fading memory) R10K Challenge XL, and the best the challenge could do
(with a year of tuning by SGI) was 1.5x the Sybase performance of the
SS1000.  The 4x250MHz E4000 that replaced the SGI went something like 14x
out of the box. :-)

AN SS1000 is still a good system.  With 8 procs you have 4 system boards,
each system board has lotsa SBUS, as well as 10 mbit ether and narrow
SCSI.  If you can find a good deal on SunSwift cards (10/100 + FW SCSI),
you can build a hell of a system.  There's decent, if not stellar
bandwidth on the XDBUS, and they seem to run well for years at a time.

> > I still think that the E4000/4500 may be the best system *ever* made by
> > Sun.
> 
> They sound cool.  They certainly are expensive though.

They are getting cheaper in the used market as the US-III systems get
popular.  I imagine there will be a flood of 'em when some of the big
sites (like Intuit, fer example) upgrade.

-Pete