[geeks] Careeer shifting

[Peter L. Wargo]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Tim Harrison wrote:

> Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> > P.S.  Why isn't the E10000 a mainframe?  It comes with a mainframe
> > pricetag...
> 
> This is just my opinion, but it seems that people don't want to hear the
  [...]
> boxen are "high end servers" for "mission critical data centre
> applications". :)

Well, Sun calls the new Serengeti line "Midframes" (I still can't
understand that one.  Or calling them "Sun Fire" systems, which conflicts
with the internal name of the previous generation E3x00-E6x00'sm which
were called "Sunfire").

Marketing dildoheads aside, we never use the word mainframe at work.
"Friggin' big SMP box" comes to mind... What the E10K really is is a mix
of I/O and CPU - it's not the fastest (now), but I have seen a full-up
64-way with 466's cranking along with a metric buttload of disk and not
even beginning to sweat.  (With SBUS, mind you!  I still think PCI sucks.)

To me, a mainframe is a really special beast, full of features that keep
it running no matter what.  The E10K has quite a few RAS features, but
there are some single points of failure that keep it, IMO, from being a
"mainframe".  (The centerplane, while able to be run in a degraded mode,
is still a single point of failure, as is the system clock.  There are two
sources for sysclock, but the entire frame has to go down to fail it
over.)

_pete