Multiprocessor system VS one processor system
Erich Dollansky
oceanare at pacific.net.sg
Thu Mar 18 19:13:00 PST 2004
Hi,
Olaf Hoyer wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Simon wrote:
>
>
>>What exactly is not easily achievable with a modern dual Xeon Intel server
>>with 20 modern SCSI harddrives and proper RAID card? that is on an old
>>E450 Sparc? have you personally done any testing to back this up? surely,
>>the chipset design of Intel boards are not up-to-par with latest Sun servers,
>>but Intel is catching up. There was just never enough demand until now.
>
>
> Yes, its an E450 with 4x400MHZ Ultrasparc 2, IIRC with 2 or 4MB 2nd
> level cache, acting as mail server, pumping several millions of emails
> around per day, with 2 million mailboxes to deliver to, being one of
> several mailhosts.
>
> Thats a region where a i386-based box won't fit easily, also the
> diagnostics regarding flaky RAM or CPU are way better with SUN than with
> most i386-based hardware.
>
People tend to forget that the CPU clock rate of all Sun boxes is
pretty low but the I/O bandwith is much higher than the memory
bandwith of Xeon machine.
Little things like changing a CPU while the machine is up and
running is not known to PC based servers at all.
A PC based server is good when you have to consider the money but
will increase the risk of down-time.
Erich
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