[geeks] Disturbing Sun articles

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, wa2egp at att.net wrote:

> It's just that I've been reading a lot of "my Suns take too much power
> so I'm getting a PC" stuff this past week and it's getting old real
> fast.

There's a bit of merit in that argument.  Going from a rack of
UltraSPARC-II era Sun gear (three 1U Netras, an E3000, an Ultra 5, and a
couple Ultra 2 systems) to an 8-core PC dropped my power bill $350/mo and
gets my work done faster.  Despite being PC garbage, it's also more reliable
than 10-year-old kit.  Even I had to finally admit that pumping money into
replacement parts for over-the-hill hardware was a silly plan for someone
allegedly trying to get work done out of his house.

Before I went there, I weighed the options of a modern UltraSPARC t1-based
system and an IBM p520.  The p520, in retrospect, may have been a better
purchase, even if it'd cost almost 50% more (not including what it
would've cost to add the 3TB of storage the PC has), since poor[0]
hardware choices leave me running everything in one shared FreeBSD
environment, which is NOT what I wanted.  The p520 I priced could've
easily run enough AIX LPARs to support my services.  I went with a PC
solely on the prospect of being able to run some virtualization software
and multiple OSes.

The Sun option quickly invalidated itself.  Sun doesn't ship the t1 in a
reasonably-priced system that runs below 60dB, so I wouldn't be able to
run it in the part of the house I actually live in, thus negating most of
the power savings, as I'd have to keep the computer room cool for a 1U
system that I'd still likely be able to hear in the rest of the house.

Sun have determined that if you don't intend to put their equipment in a
typical datacenter, you're not worth having as a customer.


[0] The Tyan motherboard I have won't run ESX.  The RAID card I have isn't
     supported by Solaris.  Apart from VMware Server (and its atrocious I/O
     performance), Xen (which I couldn't get to work quite right on RHEL 5)
     and Microsoft HyperV, I can't virtualize on this huge box.  This is
     all top-shelf hardware, but, together, can't do what I bought it to do
     because the PC platform is such garbage.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |