On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 23:38 -0400, Peter Arremann wrote:
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.
Build time is _never_ a good reference of server benchmark.
As a webserver and so on the picture is similar.
Some of the computational is relative. It all depends on the web application.
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.
??? I would beg to differ. Especially versus most "commodity" PC servers.
If you have a set of applications or services that are well distributed, but require I/O or scale linearly in a NUMA platform, then the interconnect of a high-end EXX00 is better than many PC systems.
Of course, I would definitely spend my money on a 4-way HP DL585 instead a 8-16 way Sun EXX00, a 2-way HP DL365 or even Sun z2100 instead of a 4- way E450, etc...
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.