[geeks] Sun-HOWTO

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 08:55:58PM -0700, Peter L. Wargo wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > site, so I made a guess.  Anyway, since I'm at there site, let me put
> > together some real numbers.
> > 
> > $4,100,000 for the server.
> > $650 for a Sun Ray 100.
> 
> On their site, they fail to mention disk.  Let's see, a few T3's in a
> rack...  Not to mention site prep costs, install costs, etc.  This is, of
> course, assuming your datacenter has 12 30-amp lines available, as well as
> the ability to cool over 60Kbtu/hr of system...

Well, it's not like I said every large office should rush out and
switch.  I would imagine that most places that have 2304 workstations
probably could figure out how to supply that sort of power.  Or course,
pitching the existing investment would also be problematic.

> No, I could imagine they could do it, but if you were really
> mission-critical, you'd have a pair of 'em clustered, to avoid a SPOF.

They don't support hotswapping everything?  My understanding is that with
IBMs it is traditional to have hotspare machines only if one is offsite or
it is used for life critical applications.  And zServers seem to be what
Sun is targetting.

But, what do I know.  My goal is to write code for running on CPU
intensive machines, not to figure out the details of deploying Sunfires
and zServers.  The day I can consider deploying a zServer as a personal
file server would be seriously cool though, but I fear that it will never
happen the way that IBM structures their licensing and support structures.
 
> I will say this, though - none of us miss our U10's, the Sunrays are
> quiet, fast, and it is so cool to snag your card on the way to another
> office, then just plug it in and keep working.  Handy as all hell for
> meetings.

That sounds cool.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd