[rescue] intel vs. sun- for real

[Koyote]

> > The machines in question are each attached to eight 73G drives, and suck
> > backups from the client servers on our network. They're doing this
> > fairly constantly, day and night, and gzipping the data (keeping the
> > load off the client boxes). The move the data off to tape once a week
> > for (semi)permanent archiving.
> 
> How about 8 U1E's? 170's or 200's.
> They should be able to take all the data you can push through a network 
> interface, and they will handle 73 gig drives. (one each)

Whoa! That's gotta hurt ;) - I'd never try to run that much gzip load combined with ethernet on ultrasparc 1 cpus. I was going to suggest clustered 420r machines or a rack o 120s connected to EMC.

If all you want at all is toasting a single 100/tx interface, you can do it with an SM81. That's easy, but the 8x8 73  gig drives, the gzip, and the constant transfer argue to me that a SAN (even a homebrew), a pile of cpu for compression, and a whole buttload of ethernet is called for 

-Christof