On Wednesday 29 June 2005 23:23, Bruno Delbono wrote:
Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org wrote:
From: Rodrigo Barbosa rodrigob@suespammers.org
Btw, don't quote me on this one :) I'm only 90% sure of the hotswapping capabilities, and less than 50% sure about the price :)
There _are_ systems with hot-swap CPUs, memory and/or, PCI[-X] slots. They are _not_ commodity and pricey, and require OS-level support.
Sun EXX00 + series running UltraSparc II and above have pretty much hot swapable everything: cpu, memory, disks etc.
And they are cheap on ebay these days (8-24 way 400 Mhz US-II (64-bit), with anywhere from 2-14 GB memory and FC-AL IO etc. EX500).
If you need any kind of performance and reliability, stay away from those though. First, a E4500 with 8CPUs running Solaris compiles the tree for one of the products we work with in about an hour and a half. A single P4 3.2Ghz running Linux takes about 12 minutes. As a webserver and so on the picture is similar. The US-I/II frames only shine if you go big (64cpus) or if you have an app that takes a huge amount of memory. Anything thats IO isn't terrible but any PCIe device will blow it away. And reliability... figure in that the box is a few years old... Its just not the same as new... Besides that, a component failure will bring those designs down and they have never been very reliable in coming back up without you removing the failed component...
The redundancy and so that the US-I/II designs offer don't make up for the age of the system.
Peter.