On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 19:34 -0400, John Hinton wrote:
I mean spending 5 to 40g on a server that will get a 5% load, is just a waste of money.
Don't confuse CPU load with interconnect and I/O load. I/O load is very difficult to measure in Linux, and interconnect is virtually impossible. You can literally have less than 2% CPU load and your I/O cards are not only starving for bandwidth, but contending for it (even worse).
I guess we all forget the other man's situation. Yeah, some networks have huge throughput... and then others are just struggling for more bandwidth for less money....
My point is that 9 times out of 10, I can design a higher performing set of servers and network for _lower_cost_ than what people think is a modest server at a much higher cost.
I don't know how many times I walk into a company and they put a $200-300 server mainboard with $15,000 of storage and other hardware. Not only could I give them 3x the performance with a $700 mainboard, but I probably could have architect a storage solution that is more faster, reliable and uses far less power, for less than 1/3rd the price.