[CentOS] Opteron, Athlon/64, and disaster recovery

[Bryan J. Smith]

Benjamin Smith <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote:
> Client is cash-poor, in particular, is really feeling the
> squeeze from the death of the dial-up industry. 

How much does it cost them per hour of downtime?

If it's enough, then spending $200 to build a backup,
Socket-754 system of just a case, PS, mainboard, CPU and
memory is well worth it.

> Saving $3,000 while still providing reasonable options for
> "worst case" can provide a lot of brownie points...

Saving $2,800, $200 less, and reducing the downtime to
minutes, instead of hours or even days in procuring new
equipment, is a far better argument IMHO.

> in any event, I've done a fairly large number of hardware
> swaps between P3/P4/Athlon systems, and haven't had much 
> trouble with it.

On Linux, yes, to a point.  Especially with the new 2.6
kernel, where the i686 kernel dynamically loads PPro/P2, P3,
P4, Athlon/Opteron, etc... optimizations.  Otherwise, I used
to see people pull their hair out on 2.4, when they switched
out a disk installed on an Athlon for a P4.  Kernel panic
(due to the Athlon kernel ;-).

> When the next Opteron server comes in, after I've set it
up, 
> I'll test it out on an Athlon/64 system I can borrow for a
> bit and see what issues I run into. 

Or you could just spend $200 and give your client a sub-hour
recovery time, instead of hours/days.



-- 
Bryan J. Smith     Professional, Technical Annoyance                      b.j.smith at ieee.org      http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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*** Speed doesn't kill, difference in speed does ***