[rescue] intel vs. sun- for real

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Koyote wrote:

> Of course, background is needed: this is mostly a NFS, HTTPS, and
> samba server.(There's a little bit of website front end, but it's
> mostly about getting data to user.) It's internal, serves large
> amounts of data per connection, but sustains relatively few
> connections. - though the mean load is ridiculoudly low (call it 20
> downloads per day (except at beginning of term), but 50-700 meg each
> download)
>
> The disk is pretty easy, goal is an a1000.

You are aware of the performance considerations of the A1k vs JBOD
configs, correct?  Will this be read-mostly or read-write?

> Where we are having issues is finding real hard numbers for why the
> dual P4 is less suitable than a netra t1 ac200 or a netra 120. (My
> gf's boss was thinking about a 280R, but that's overkill- she just
> wnats it cuz it's new and is instisting that it's only fair to compare
> the dual intel dell server to a dual US3 box. Of course, she doesn't
> wnat to pay)

>From what you've mentioned, it seems like overall system performance will
not be a significant concern with reasonably modern hardware.

There are two distinct issues here, Sparc vs x86 and Solaris vs Linux.
Both x86 and Sparc will probably serve you equally well here.

Solaris has a more mature (by far) NFS implementation, more mature and
featureful filesystem options, and in my opinion a better IP stack than
Linux.  Kernel threading is considerably more pervasive.

Is there a particular reason that Solaris x86 is not a consideration?
Provided you can feed it useful hardware, it's quite a nice performer.

-James