On 10/31/2014 10:48 AM, Gordon Messmer wrote: > On 10/31/2014 08:53 AM, Les Mikesell wrote: >> Nobody is_buying_ 32 bit machines any more, but machines sold 10 >> years ago were surprisingly robust > > They were also surprisingly slow. Without any hyperbole, you could > almost certainly replace an entire rack of ten year old 1U servers > with a single 1U server today for a very reasonable cost and see > performance that's at least equal, with a fraction of the power draw > (and associated ongoing costs). easily, and even with the overhead of virtualization, have each of them be far faster. I forcefully retired and virtualized any and all remaining 'netburst' (P4) architecture machines in my lab onto a 12 core nethalem based box and each one is way faster even when they are all being blasted at once. SAS rather than SCSI is more robust and reliable (10 year old SCSI cables are fun sources of random glitches). -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast