[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Eric Ozrelic]

I think everybody's arguing different points. Comparing workstations to
servers, reliability vs. aesthetics, etc. If people are going to be
comparing the *cool looking factor* of a Cray vs. the stability and speed of
an Intel SMP workstation, then this thread should be canned.

Regards,

Eric Ozrelic


-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Linc Fessenden
Sent: Monday, June 24, 2002 10:13 AM
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?


> More name calling.  That says a lot about your character (or lack
> thereof)
>
> Before I suspected, but now I am quite sure, I'm dealing with a common
> BS artist that is either (a) regurgitating the same tripe they heard
> from someone else who was posting the same nebulous scat but in an
> authoritative and confident tone or (b) has convinced their employer to
> invest so much $$$ in said hardware that it would look very bad for them
> to ever concede that cheaper hardware could be better.

Dude, you're barking at the wrong guy there..  Not only is Dave
M. probably one of the most computer literate people I have ever met, but
he is a good guy to boot and has helped me on many an occasion...

> 99% of data centers don't need Crays.  This is evidenced by their
> increasing difficulty to find a market for their boxen.
>
> Real world, why on God's green earth would you want to spend $100,000 on
> a piece of kit when the job can get done just as well (or better) on
> $2,000 to $10,000 worth of kit?  Why can't anyone answer that simple
> question?

Simply put because you can't keep cheap PC parts running as long as you
can other arch's.  Some company's (other than dot bombs) actually see the
need to keep their mission critical systems running.
You can also think in terms of redundancy..  Corps that run big intel
farms have huge redundancy systems, ie. you have that 2ghz pent system
running as a web server but still need 4 of them because 1 can't handle
the load and then you need backups for hardware crashes, etc...
Sun systems just run more reliably than that, period.
Sometimes quality is better than quantity.  At least IMHO.

--
-Linc Fessenden

In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded - Yeah right...