[geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[alex j avriette]

>> thats still BS.

just for recap. because it still is.

> I didn't say 1000 servers, I said thousands of servers.  At
> least 40,000 (on the low side).  All with dynamically
> adjustable CPU, memory, and I/O.

uh-huh. 40,000 web servers? exactly how much traffic are you pushing 
here? page counts? byte counts? i dont believe for a femtosecond that 
bang:buck netras dont whup your mainframes ass.

> The bandwidth isn't just out to the Internet.  There's also
> data being transferred on the intranet, including data to
> and and from database servers.  I also don't want to limit

lets do some basic multiplication. 2 nics times 208 netras times 100T 
times 50% = 208,000 mbit. with proper switches and routers, you can do 
better than 50% efficiency on your network. so with a combined 
throughput in the area of *FIFTY* t3's, the netras are still putting the 
z...whateverthehellitsnamewas to shame.

at this kind of throughput, your biggest concern is not going to be your 
network bandwidth (assuming youve got your 208gbit pipe - feh!), but 
your disk bandwidth. because youre not going to have each netra mirror 
the disk, and youre not going to have enough disk io to talk to your 
40,000 servers. in fact, lets do some more math. you wanted a gbic on 
each netra, eh? so you mean you want to push 208gbit. (never mind netras 
cant do gbit, bear with me...) provided i did my math right on my 
calculator here, thats 26gbyte/s of bandwidth. i see youve purchased 
yourself that new cray solid state storage thingy. even at 50% 
efficiency, thats better than your average DDR ram. by a lot.

> I didn't say a z800 was good for every application, I was
> refuting Sun's claims that a z800 was not any good for any
> application.  For a low-volume place such as your $job, Netras

so whats all this rubbish about using it for web serving? bah. you want 
a good task for a z800, put a billion row database on top of it that 
needs 400,000 concurrent connections. _that_ is a job for a database.

> are the way to go.  For IT outsourcing and high-volume places
> (multiple T3 and up), the z800 is a win.

not for web serving :p

alex