Hello,
I haven't found Sun's service too bad, but then I guess that we are a big corp with fancy support agreements ( I guess that in Canada we are ) and they have been pretty good. The V20z and V40z are machines that puts Sun on par with Dell, IBM and HP on the x86 line in a hurry. So the offerings will be similar. But the main thing as you said is the support.
Take a look a Dell, they have their new Dell 28xx series which has EMT64 should be able to run 64bit Linux. We have been testing Oracle 10g on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PE26xx series machines and its connect to a Hitachi SAN and its produced excellent results.
IBM has their Power5 line of machines which also run Linux, so you can check this out too. Their Power4's didn't perform as well in a similar configuration to Dell 26xx series machines from what I understand on Oracle tests.
Cheers,
Aly.
Rhugga wrote:
--- Aly Dharshi <aly.dharshi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,
Have you considered looking at Sun's AMD offerings, they have a AMD line, the V20z and V40z, they are quite spiffy, they are basically Newisys boxes, they have licensed this technology. They have another design going on around the AMD chips called Galaxy which is still to appear. This will be a full Sun design. Don't quote me on this Galaxy bitty.
IBM has also got AMD64 offerings, HP has ditched the Itanic 2 and jumped in a hurry onto the AMD64 wagon. I believe that the EMT64 techology in the Intel chips are licensed from AMD ??? I think so. So you should be able to run Red Hat 64 or Fedora Core 64 bit on it.
The AMD64 chips should run your 32bit software without hassle. I think that you should be okay. But if it is over the next 18months I am sure that there will much more improvements on the AMD64 area. Sun should have their V80z out by then too. They are pushing the AMD64 platform quite hard.
Cheers,
I have been a die-hard Sun fan for almost 15 years and due to all my recent dificulties in dealing with them has made me decide to give other Vendors a chance. I don't wish it to be like this, dumping Sun at this point would be like an NFL veteran saying goodbye to football after a 15 year career. Just some of their recent policies and hard-nosed approach to various things have left us with a bad taste in our mouth. I am giving the servers you mentioned a glance, however, they don't offer anything a few other Vendors' servers don't and the price is nearly identical as well. Thus, it basically boils down to a support issue, which is where a lot of our recent difficulties with Sun stemmed from. We are already a large IBM shop, we have a 500-node Linux cluster, and to be honest I haven't been real impressed with their hardware or their support (the latter is more of an issue with IBM as well). We also have a SAN from IBM and have nothing but problems with it the 2 years we have had it. We have had 2 total downtimes lasting 13 days for the last one and if it didn't cost so damn much I would have set it out on the street for the garbage men.
At this point I am gonna give HP a shot, at least get a pair of the DL-585's to do my initial evaluation with. I may still stick with Solaris 9 x86 until a solid 2.6 based version of Fedora Core is supported, but I feel I need to test the waters elsewhere as far as hardware goes.
Thx for the info however. -rhugga
-- Aly Dharshi aly.dharshi@xxxxxxxxx
"A good speech is like a good dress that's short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover the subject"
