[geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[Eric Dittman]

> > When you've got a lot of servers running, you a lot of
> > bandwidth so they aren't all going down a shared 100M
> > pipe.  Remember, we are talking thousands of servers.
> 
> thats still BS.
> 
> if you were able to saturate, say, 2 T3's (such as we have at $job), 
> thats 90mbit/s. thats half a megabit/s per netra, provided we have the 
> aforementioned rack of 180 netras. so you have 999.5 megabit of "spare 
> bandwidth" on the netras. if you had five racks of netras, you'd be 
> close to your 1000 servers (one httpd instance per server? hmph!)... do 
> you see where this is going?

I didn't say 1000 servers, I said thousands of servers.  At
least 40,000 (on the low side).  All with dynamically
adjustable CPU, memory, and I/O.

The bandwidth isn't just out to the Internet.  There's also
data being transferred on the intranet, including data to
and and from database servers.  I also don't want to limit
the bandwidth of my highest volume server to that of my
lowest volume server.

I didn't say a z800 was good for every application, I was
refuting Sun's claims that a z800 was not any good for any
application.  For a low-volume place such as your $job, Netras
are the way to go.  For IT outsourcing and high-volume places
(multiple T3 and up), the z800 is a win.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net
Check out the DEC Enthusiasts Club at http://www.dittman.net/