[rescue] intel vs. sun- for real

[s at avoidant.org]

Koyote wondered:

>  So, my girlfriend is being forced to give hard evidence why a
>  single or dual cpu UltraSparc would be more advantageuous to
>  purchase than an intel box. Performance, reliability, anything.


OK, I've got a similar question. I'm wanting to replace 8 Intel boxes
running Solaris with SPARC(s). Can someone recommend a suitable machine
that won't cost upwards of $100,000?

The machines in question are each attached to eight 73G drives, and suck
backups from the client servers on our network. They're doing this
fairly constantly, day and night, and gzipping the data (keeping the
load off the client boxes). The move the data off to tape once a week
for (semi)permanent archiving.

So we're talking major I/O, and high cpu load. Almost anything
affordable will be on it's knees.

Realistically, I ought to be talking mainframe just for the insane data
transfer, but who's got the money?

Thoughts?


---sambo