Sorry to disrupt the thread - my mail reader chewed up half my inbox today...
alex@milivojevic.org wrote:
E4500 is discontinued for some time now. It is rather old machine, much older that the above mentioned P4. I doubt that Peter's intention was to compare speed of Sun's server in general with the speed of latest-and-greates P4 systems. I hope that he simply forgot to mention how much older that E4500 is than the P4 box.
Actually that was exactly the point. The email I responded to was mentioning ancient US-I/II frames as a solution for the hotswap issue. My point was that for the same cost I can get a 8way E4500/400/4MB or a nice P4 PC... From the speed perspective you'll be hard pressed to find an app that is faster on the sun and the age of the E4500 negates any advantage it used to have in reliability. The E4500 doesn't even have redundant power :-)
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People that buy E4500 nowdays are either buying them for spare parts, or they simply want redundant box exactly the same as the old box they already have. Or people that simply need some Sparc hardware around, but don't want to spend money on current line of Sun's servers and don't care if the system is slow as long as it does the job (my guess is Peter's company falls into this category, from what he wrote, otherwise they would be running their Sparc builds on something more recent)
I was giving the E4500 as a comparison because it costs the same. Unfortunately we got apps here that outgrow F15K frames - performance can't ever be good enough. But even if you get a V440 (from integer processing the currently fastest cpu Sun has to offer) you're still so much slower when doing compiles. A build that can be done on a single cpu linux box (3.2Ghz P4) is a fraction of the time of that V440 time... Compiles aren't a great benchmark for a box since its 100% cpu and neglects memory or disk performance but I had the numbers handy for that :-)
Anyway, point I was trying to make is that if anyone points a US-II based frame today they are mistaken about its performance and reliability. Just the disks in D1000 trays are so much of a headache that you wouldn't believe it. And Sun doesn't support booting of EMC on the smaller frames - so you need some local attached storage...
Peter.