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Million Dollar Reviews: Sun E10K/4500/450 Servers
redir writes "There is an interesting article on Reviewboard.com about Sun's bigboy E10k million dollar servers. They also have one on the E4500 and the E450.. It's a good read and breaks down the rational behind the architecture designs." I might prefer an IBM S/390 for my own den, but it's interesting for those of us at present lacking a computer budget like these demand to read about what makes them so pricey. Maxing out at 16 multi-CPU system boards and 64 gigs of RAM makes a nice start.
here is a quote from the current article online:
The E10k frame is capable of holding up to 16 system boards, with a minimum of 4 boards. Each system board can hold four CPUs (480mhz), 4GB RAM (4 banks of 1GB), and either 4 SBUS devices, or 2 PCI devices. (Note: in the future, this *may* support faster CPUs, 2x higher memory density, and 3 PCI devices per system board, specs are as of 03/29/2000)
when i read the article earlier today, the date read 12/29/2000. i wish i could prove it, but i swear it's true. anyone else remember the old date, or have a cached version with the old date? it seems that reviewboard has changed their date to match their "it's been up since march" story. that plus the 480 mhz cpus and the quotes from epinions in the e4500 story (sorry, redir, there's just too much evidence) makes me think that this really is a case of plaigarism. i hope epinions does something about it.
Ok this has gotten so childish I've actually resorted to this statement. Enough. I disagree with you, available now is probably just something he did because he knew the article would be read in the future, who knows, I don't care enough anymore to give a shit, I was just emailed the logs, and database dump of the whole thing from the editor who now feels like he has to prove something. I am more than satisfied and they will be contacting epinions to let them know they need to take down their versions of reviewboard's articles and delete the fraudulant user. Kind regards I told you so.
-=Redir
Yes. The ones running 400mhz have a 100mhz backside bus. Otherwise, it is 83mhz.
Now you're just lying to support someone else's story? Comon dude... you are him aren't you? Tell the truth. You're the guy that stole the article from Reviewboard and posted it on epinions right? You're mad because your account is gonna get deleted? hahaha jeez you are low man.
-=Redir
BTW, the 480mhz processors for the E10k aren't even available now. See the Sun specification site for details.. Also funny how he knew about Sun's 2x higher memory densitry (which also is not yet supported on the E10k) in March, long before it was available for the lower-end servers.
another paragraph is stolen from a different eopinions review of the e10k, posted in august. ha!
he E10k frame is capable of holding up to 16 system boards, with a minimum of 4 boards. Each system board can hold four CPUs (480mhz), 4GB RAM (4 banks of 1GB), and either 4 SBUS devices, or 2 PCI devices. (Note: in the future, this *may* support faster CPUs, 2x higher memory density, and 3 PCI devices per system board, specs are as of 03/29/2000)
For starters, 480mhz processors aren't even available NOW for the E10k, and only the E450. See this Sun Specifications for the E10kpage for verification.
Now, go read my view at Epinions about the Sun Enterprise 10000.
At this point, it should be pretty clear which is the original article and which is the changed one. BTW, if the people at Slashdot save a copy of the web pages before they post it, then check their original copy. You'll find that the date was really "12/29/00" at the review site, and not the "3/29/00" that it is now.
It doesn't make sense that a site would say that 480mhz processors are available in March when they aren't even available now. Not to mention the 2x density RAM that wasn't even announced for the lower-end servers at that point.
This story is a plagairism of my original work, and I am COMPLETELY DISGUSTED at the theft of my work.
Dude, you need to tell this to the people who wrote the article, you might get more clues out of them. There's little point in ranting here about it and asking us to do your digging.
Selecta
The Ultra Enterprise 10k is one of the best computers ever developed. Dynamic reconfiguration adds extremely to the reliablility of the system. I especially like their idea of having a "spinner" system board that just gets dynamically added when a particular domain is under heavy load. Can you imagine what its successor (running the US3) will have... :-)
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
I would definitely take a E10k if I could, even with the PCI DR/AP limitations (can't run 80/160MBps SCSI on them with DR/AP support).. IIRC some components of the backplane were SPOF as well (though rare failures :p).. I can't wait until the USIII upgrades and Serengeti come along, so some of these puppies start appearing in the refurb/off-lease lists ;)
BTW, isn't DSD support for all enterprise multi-CPU getting incorporated into Solaris soon?
Your Working Boy,
> i have an e4500 with 8 cpus, 2 gigs of ram,
> and tons of disk space, it is DOG SLOW
Want to hire me to set it up properly for you?
You know, people like you should be banned from the gene pool.
Seems that the facts are mixed here...
The S/390 port was started by volunteers which, indeed, did it on their spare time..
At the same time, few engineers from IBM heard about the idea and started to port Linux to S/390 without telling anyone outside IBM and THAT's the port that everyone knows about (it includes a proprietary network driver).
If I'm not mistaken, there is a story about it in Salon's archives.
Hetz (Heunique)
Actually, I heard that Linuxcare Australia are working on porting Linux to Ex000 machines.
Not sure though...
Hetz (Heunique)
nope, i'm not. but as with all good conspiracy theories (and here we have two competing) there's no way for me to prove that, although if you suggest something reasonable i'll go along with it. why are you so sure that reviewboards is right, redir? what's your connection? and what's this editor's email address that everyone seems to have access to? i sent mail to the contact address on the reviewboards site, but /i/ didn't receive a reply. maybe i just didn't dig deep enough on the site to find a personal email address.
here are the facts: parts of two different epinions posts are identical to a review on reviewboards.
parts of another review on reviewboards (by the same author) are identical to yet a third post on epinions.
some people on slashdot claim the editor told them the piece had been up since march and therefore the epinions piece is plagiarism.
a date for specs in the article on reviewboards changed from 12/29/00 to 03/29/00.
12/29/00 is a correct date for the specs in the article on reviewboards. 03/29/00 is an incorrect date for the article on review boards (this is the smoking gun really).
yes, it is possible that there's a psychotic guy on slashdot with multiple accounts, who also has multiple accounts on epinions, who has been plagiarizing (since august - that's when the earliest epinions post about the e10k is dated) bits and pieces of a reviewboards review (that he archived in march, since it was offline in august, remeber redir?) there are people on the internet odd enough to do such a thing.
but it seems much more likely to me that chris chabot's posts on reviewboard are plagiarized from various epinion posts.
as far as redir's, fuckface's, and ataridatacenter's "quotes" from the "editor". whatever. redit has "logs". fuckface was told the article was up in march, redir was told it was up for "almost a year". whatever. totally unprovable in any case, and irrelevant in coming to the pretty clear conclusion that the reviewboard article copied the epinions articles, not the other way around.
and again, the question is, what's your connection to reviewboards, redir?
Why would I want to run Linux on a E10000?
Any problems that you had with the machine would be blamed on Linux, just the time saved from arguing with tech support would be worth running solaris.
Sun has a great os with widespread support, so Solaris isn't going anywhere. Companies like SGI need to dump IRIX because they cannot afford to maintain it anymore, not because they love linux.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Um... excuse me, but it seems that you have resorted to insults instead of valid arguments to refute this guy's statements. He has just provided evidence on a third party's site that at least part of the article was completely ripped off. And I'm inclined to believe that the rest was too.
Also, it is awfully strange that someone who just happened to see a cool article on some site would be so zealous in defending the authenticity of the article if they didn't have a vested interest in the article being credible. I sure hope you have good lawyers, because it looks like you're going to be a defendant in a lawsuit pretty soon...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Completely false statment about Amazon. They have hundreds if not thousands of Unix systems in production.
your theft was posted in December? The reason it is on their cover is it is being hit more than any other review right now (their site dynamically shifts content based on popularity). Those are the answers I got when I emailed the editor. Nice try there bud, but I think your "Epinions" review was a total rip off and you are just trying to look good. Nice try.
-=Redir
That 400 megahertz processor operates on about 4 times more CPU instructions per clock cycle than your X86 chip. You're comparing apples and oranges. And I have bad software support problems on my IBM Aptiva running Windows that crashes every 5-7 days. What problems do SPARC chips have that x86 chips don't?
You are wrong. An Intel P3 or an AMD Athlon absolutely smokes the USII in terms of instructions per clock cycle. Fortunately most people don't use these machines for their raw CPU power, they use 'em for the I/O throughput. Current Sun architecture is quite a bit faster than current Intel architecture in addition to the fact that Sun uses huge amounts of L2 cache. The USIII and the Intel P4 will be on par with each other in terms of I/O throughput (they'll both be at 3.2GBps).
What exactly is standard about needing a massive image editing package with your server? Dumb statement.
How will you ever get a job in the real world when you equate Microsoft Paint with Oracle in the same sentence. I'm a sys admin and haven't touched a graphics program for work in over 5 years.
You seem to imply here that graphics programs are not valid applications for a server. A lot of very strenuous supercomputing that is done is directly related to graphics. I know quite a few people that are using SGIs on the same scale as the E10k to do rendering. Incidentally, SGIs work quite well for this as they have slightly better fp performance as well as a more scalable MP architecture requiring simpler programming (multi-threaded vs. clustered). The fact remains though that neither MIPS nor SPARC have the FP performance of an Alpha, Intel, or AMD which is what some people use to build render clusters (think Titanic).
Calling the original poster dumb was an argument ad hominem. It also makes you an asshole (another argument ad hominem).
Most Sun hardware is pretty reliable though it is overpriced in comparison to Intel hardware of equivalent quality. I can buy a dual-processor E220 for ~$20,000. I could buy an equivalent Compaq, HP, or Dell rack-mounted server for half that. It would have slightly better better CPU performance and slightly less I/O throughput.
Sun's specifically aren't good at hosting dynamic web pages because they can require quite a bit of CPU and relatively small amounts of data. Sun machines do better with huge amounts of data and relatively smaller CPU loads. The make great Oracle servers. Which is what I gather you are using them for.
Additionally, MS SQL Server 2000 on Win2k on a quad-processor Compaq (Xeon 700Mhz) can be faster than a quad-processor E450.
Yes, you are a Sun Bigot. You are also an asshole (once again, there goes that ad hominem thing again). You're almost as bad as a mainframe guy. People that think that they have a concept of system architecture but get their judgement clouded by their own zealous behaviour annoy the shit out of me.
Additionally, I'll provide something that you didn't provide while debunking the earlier poster's comments.
Check out specint and specfp marks on Intel P3s versus ultrasparc IIs. go to http://www.spec.org for the info. For database results that prove my point check out tpc-c benchmarks at http://www.tpc.org. Granted, they don't have results for Oracle 8i on a quad-processor E450, but they do have results from other rdbms vendors. The E450 scores about a third slower than the quad-processor compaq.
Have a nice day.
I bet, however this review has been on our site for over 2 months. You have
a lot of sand to come to us and say you wrote this. Our review was posted
10/25/2000 at 1:57p.m. We moved it to the front cover of the site for a
promotion we are doing on our server section.
I'd love to meet the "so-called author" of this article. All that E10k hands-on experience and a LOT of details.. And when pressed, the editor says the original date is "conveniently" made two months ago. Riiiiigggghtttt.
The style of writing is my own. The unique concept my own. And I *will* go the extra mile to prove this. This is an INSULT to me.
Sparc is a lousy processor. 400 megahertz? And software support and development problems are also bad.
That 400 megahertz processor operates on about 4 times more CPU instructions per clock cycle than your X86 chip. You're comparing apples and oranges. And I have bad software support problems on my IBM Aptiva running Windows that crashes every 5-7 days. What problems do SPARC chips have that x86 chips don't?
standard Linux tools like Gimp
What exactly is standard about needing a massive image editing package with your server? Dumb statement
How will we ever be taught about the high level programs the end user deals with or the websites, when we don't even have a graphics tool comparable to Microsoft Paint.
How will you ever get a job in the real world when you equate Microsoft Paint with Oracle in the same sentence. I'm a sys admin and haven't touched a graphics program for work in over 5 years.
Sun computers are expensive, unreliable, slow, of a bad design, and are falling more behind each day.
Expensive? Yep, but they run better than your x86 boxes, even running Linux, sorry. Unreliable? Maybe when you let the developers have root access and tune things to their heart's content. We ran E10 domains that were up for months, and only went down because we installed some new software on a test domain (hence test), or we were installing upgrades and brought it down. Bad design? Maybe if you want it to look like an Intel or Apple, but for what it does, it does it as well as anything out there. And what's with falling behind more every day. Get your head out of your Megahertz, the days when X+25 is faster than X have been gone since the Pentium Pro and a second motherboard chipset.
Amazon is now on Linux.
Because Amazon hasn't made a dollar in over 3 years of operation. They can't afford Sun.
selling, hosting static pages, sharing information, databases
Selling? What's that got to do with computers? E-Commerce you mean? It's all in the software. Of course, if your computers can't handle the load, then you've got a problem. Hosting static pages? Yay, whooee, big load on your computer there. Static pages aren't where the web is going anyway. Sharing information? That's what Email is for. And Databases? On Win2K? Maybe if you're talking about your contact manager database with your friend's names and phone numbers, but for that matter, you could have used a CSV Spreadsheet from Excel for Windows and a little DOS batch file to break it out.
Sun Bigot? No, but kiddies who convinced their parents that they needed to have that 1GHz Athlon because it's 1000KHz and so it's the fastest, and have no concept of system architecture irritate me.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Please note that I have no idea who's the culprit and who's the victim here. Just reporting what I saw.
> I am a linux fan
uh-oh. Guess what's coming...
> Sparc is a lousy processor.
even when you run linux on it?
> 400 megahertz?
64 processors?
> And software support and
> development problems are also bad.
Yeah, why develop with Workshop with (in my experience) excellent telephone support when you can use Emacs, gcc and the man page?
> Solaris is so stripped down
Or you could say most Linux distributions come with so much crap.
> and has an
> inferior program for each part of it.
> csh,
ksh, sh, bash, zsh, ash, jsh etc. etc.
> plain old vi,
Or Vim, Emacs, nano etc. etc. They don't just work on linux you know.
> and it does not have
> standard Linux tools like Gimp.
Ah yes, Gimp. Essential on a production database machine, webserver, data warehouse etc. etc. Takes about 10 or 15 minutes to build it from source on my Solaris box.
> I would rather have a server which is similar
> to the workstation.
Fine. I'll take the 64 CPU E10K tuned for the application it's running.
> the Sun computers in the CSE lab are
> ridiculous! They don't have anything that have
> become standard in Linux distributions.
So you have a lazy sys-admin. That's not Sun's fault.
> How will we ever be taught about the high
> level programs the end user deals with
Do like I did and learn them yourself.
> or the
> websites, when we don't even have a graphics
> tool comparable to Microsoft Paint.
Use the PCs for graphics then and leave the serious stuff to the Sun boxes.
> Let us
> have Linux and Oracle/mySQL, GIMP, bash, word
> processing/office programs, multimedia, etc.
Don't tell us, tell your admin!
> Sun computers are expensive,
well, at least that's true. But, you get what you pay for.
> unreliable
Sorry, that's laughable.
> slow,
Not the ones I use.
> of a bad design,
Is that the hardware or the software? On what basis do you form that opinion?
> Each person who ties their company into Sun is
> tying themselves in to ridiculously expensive
> proprietary technology.
With a great reliability, proven track record, good support, quality hardware, HA capability, massive scalability and mission critical type applications which arent' hasty ports made to take advantage of a blooming market.
> Amazon is now on Linux.
So?
> For selling, hosting
> static pages, sharing information, databases,
> etc, Linux or Windows 2000 rules!
Love the "I'm not just a closed minded, underinformed Linux zealot" Windows reference at the end! Sorry my friend - too little too late.
Linux is just dandy, but Sun software and hardware are pretty fine too. Don't write off million dollar servers on account of a few badly set up IPXs in your school lab.
I used one of those E10K for an Oracle data warehouse at MasterCard. It's a big fat sucker with tons of ram. Some moron accidentally tripped over the power wire and it took 2 hours to bring it back up one day. I can't tell you how fast Oracle ran on that puppy, but I was impressed. I was only able to write one PL/SQL script that "overworked" the server.
Developers: We can use your help.
Really you talked to the editor? What's his email address? Do you have it? I'd like to know it and see the email you are talking about. Because I got a response too and he said it's been up almost a year (MARCH 2000) so I'd say... you're lying... How many accounts does this fraud have here?
-=Redir
While not in the same caliber as the E10K, I recall reading an article where Linus was talking about the 8-processor server sitting in his garage and used for testing. So apparently there are some generous souls providing equipment. While many of us would drool, he had the nerve to complain about the noise of the thing! ;-)
A more interesting topic would be... where's the REAL news? ;)
-LN
Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a bananna.
redir writes "There is an interesting article on Reviewboard.com about Sun's bigboy E10k million dollar servers.
And you seem to have some really inside knowledge about the site. RIGHT. It appears obvious to me that you work for the site that hosted the article and are now trying to cover some tracks. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU'VE BEEN CAUGHT.
wouldnt mind having one of those in the house
The author works for Novadigm and is currently working with over 100 of these machines in an ongoing project for the U.S. Government. He holds a PH.D. in computer science and is a well known individual in good standing. You sir are a fraud.
100s of E10ks? 100s!??!!? **NO** site has 100s of them. The largest customer, as far as I am aware, is AT&T. The second largest company that uses E10ks is the company that I work for, and "dozens" may be stretching it quite a ways.
Not even AT&T has hundreds of these machines. Your latest statement is further evidence of the fraud going on here.
Well you did submit the orignal article!
And there was a pretty damning link posted about redir being the handle for the review board editor -- backed up by Google.
And if the Epinions article is so lame, how come it looked good enough to plagiarize?
You look really bad to anyone that has followed this thread. Apologizing, admiting your lies, and having the Review Board do the same are your only decent options.
Cool! I wish I hadn't used up my mod points, because you've just roasted one total loser. I hope there's some way that epinions' lawyers can eat you alive, Ferreira.
Go Kathryn Thurber!
Then someone else(*1) should submit the abuse complaint to epinions. One way or another, epinions should take a look at it.
I'm not wasting my time on it though. Well, other than these two posts :)
(*1) Such as yourself or one of the other people who are railing against him.
An accreddited site, by who? Kind of like the guy who who the article who is at a site with 100's of E10ks? Please.
Well I'm not the owner of reviewboard nor affiliated with them, but I can say that I'm sorry I thought you lied. I reall did though you bastard! So anyway :) G'night.
-=Redir
None I was just pissed off at AtariStickUpHistAssDataCenter's replies about me. I made a few comments and all of a sudden I was in "League" with them. So I started ranting :) That's about it. Other than I read reviewboard almost everyday, it goes "Slashdot.org for linux shit, then reviewboard for a gadget review and on to freshmeat for new utils, and then off to work" heh so that about does it with my 'connection'.
-=Redir
At the moment, I would not categorically say that I fully believe him, but until I hear further or learn more, I would not dismiss AD's claim just yet. Here's why:
- the style of the article is very first person and based on personal opinion. There is a lot of 'I' and 'personally' in the article. Magazine articles tend to be written in an objective tense, while 'hobby journals' like epinions or everything2.com are more in a 'this is my personal opinion' style.
- if you read the other two articles by Chris Chabot (also about Sun servers), you will find that they are both written in an objective style with no personal opinion. While not impossible, I find it suspicious that Chris' writting style changed between articles about similar topics. It may be that he is more familiar with the E10k than the other servers and hence the change in style
...
- Finally, what possible benefit does AD have in raising this as an issue? If AD was trying to hide the fact that he plagarised most people would have kept quiet and waited for the whole thing to blow over - to my way of thinking it goes completely against logic to draw attention to the fact that you may have plagarised as redir suggested in an earlier post.
What makes me suspicious about AD story however, is that he posted the story on Dec 29th 2000. It is entirely possible that the explanation that the editor gave is legit (ie the article has been on their site for some time and was brought forward for a promotion) although I believe AD had a possible explanation why this was not feasable - the CPU speed mentioned in the article was not available at the time the editor said they received the article.Anyway, as I said before, I would not place money either way ... but I wouldn't discount AD story just yet either.
Hey AD, if you are pursuing reviewboard for plagarism, how about updating Slashdot on the results?
Those of you crusing at >1 should check out this post.
This is a brilliant bit of research, proving that the guy who submitted the article to Slashdot is the same guy who runs the site, although he now is trying to hide the connection. And he's the only guy who's arguing vociferously that the plagiarism claims are bunk. Very curious!
If I could give this poster some of my karma, I would. But I can't. Could a moderator please throw him a bone?
One client specifically has told me if they lose their main E10K (they have 10 of them) they would lose $1 million A MINUTE.
And you believed them? Yet us assume that that computer is doing whatever it is doing 24/7. The $1M/minute would mean $525B/year. Since the highest grossing company in the world is GM at about $150B/year, the $1M/minute figure is highly suspect.
I get to play with these bad boys all day at work. We have 32 of them.
I'd love to do some real-world testing with Linux vs Solaris on a 64-processor system. Unfortunately even though I'm sure UltraLinux would install on it, there are some rather system specific things going on in Solaris. And I'm sure nobody has the source for those so they can compile on Linux.
On another note, did you know that you can trip the breakers on these things with a single command? 'power -off -B' kills the power and trips the breakers. Don't try and hack into the ssp, kiddies!
der dee der.
I've been reading their stuff for almost a year and they've had lots of stuff up there, including a blurb and some pics of a new DDR system from AMD that wasn't out, I can't find it now, but if they are getting stuff early from AMD they are getting it from SUN, and INTEL too. With a million reg users I'm sure they get just about anything. They just had it way before hand. I don't know about this date switching stuff, but frankly I looked in my cache and saw only 3/2000 not 12 so I think someone doctored up some bullshit there... AD stands for Attention Deficit, I think he just needs some attention.
-=Redir
Again, no proof, no headers from emails from the 'editor' just some ranting that this guy is making up. I have the editor's email response here, and that's not what he told me.
-=Redir
If you go to Google and search on phrases from the ReviewBoard article that are likely to be unique to the article, e.g. "E10k frame is capable of holding", how many hits do you get? Zero. This suggests that the article is too new to have been indexed by Google.
However, redir asserts that he has reliable information that the ReviewBoard article was written in way back in March and therefore couldn't have been copied from AD's epinions piece from a few days ago, as AD claims.
If the RB article is actually nine months old, why hasn't Google indexed it yet? Certainly, Google combs RB more frequently than once every nine months. For example, here is a RB article posted in March, and it's in Google: Search on "sprint pcs makes me think", taken from the article's opening line. Google returns the article as the first hit. (Following hits come from rb.chabotc.com.)
In summary:
This evidence is highly suggestive that AD is correct and redir is not.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
ONLY $100,000? I believe the base on the E10k is $2,000,000. I'll have to check the price tomorrow at work. =)
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
I think it is interesting to compare AtariDataCenter (henceforth ADC) and Redir's language.
:)
When did the ad hominem attack start?
In ADC's initial post, he (understandably) indicates that he is pissed, but does not attack ADC. Redir's first response refers to ADC's work as a "theft", so I would call this the first attack. ADC's response uses some sarcarsm (Riiiiigggghtttt), but is generally fairly civil. ADC responds with another attack, this time referring to ADC as a fraud and accusing him of lying.
Sampling of later language
Redir: you and your lamer friend
ADC: Your latest statement is further evidence of the fraud going on here.
Redir: ah no that's not me lewser
Redir: lewser... was the article you stole from Reviewboard in all caps?
Redir: shit a big site I go to all the time, vs. lamer eopinion article
(ADC does not make enough ad hominem attacks to sample)
Redir: I was wrong, an apology? No I am not sorry for having an opinion
Redir: Err... wait a minute... poor ataristickuphisass(sorry but I'm working out my anger guy) his article was ganked!!
Redir (last post): I reall did though you bastard!
I think it's pretty clear who the more mature person here is.
BTW Here's another language comparison I am the author of: http://www.lmarkets.com
sig: BeanShell: lightweight scripting for Ja
lewser... was the article you stole from Reviewboard in all caps?
-=Redir
i believe you. but i still think (like dustpuppy) that the (forever inconclusive without a court battle that won't happen) evidence favors ataridatacenter. and, although proving it is also pretty much impossible, i fucking swear the date changed from 12/29/00 to 03/29/00. /but/ even without the date change (that is, if it always said 03/29/00) the evidence still favors ataridatacenter, since chabot's specs are just wrong for march 2000!
ataridatacenter never did say what email address he was using when he was told that the article had been up since october/2000. nor did you or fuckface reveal which email addresses you were corresponding with. that might be helpful. if this is just chabotc@reviewboards.com (thanks! deja.com...) i'm even less inclined to believe the reviewboard's side of the story...
There's often a lot of salesguy handholding. The sales cycles for new customers often exceed 12 months for the e10k. (e10k ships with Veritas - free).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Fine. Point to a SINGLE search engine that has this article. RIGHT NOW. Go ahead. I dare you.
I just woke up to see our articles being linked by slashdot, and seeing tons of emails and message threads here on slashdot about an obvious mistake. These articles (the E10k and E4500) were send to me (by email) as a user submission, and i imediatly submitted them to our site. However looking back in hindsight (which is always 20/20) i gues i could've done some more research to make sure they were unique content, and not a rip-off as they now apear to be (from the epionion.com site).
As a result, i've imediatly have taken the articles down and we will attempt to contact the user in question and have some harsh words for him.
As far as redir's comments on slashdot go, he's a good friend of mine who's known me for a long time, and felt it was imposible that i would do such a thing, thus tried to defend my name to the bitter end. The real situation wasnt clear to him then either.
New articles on the Sun servers, are being written as we speak, based on the real specs, and based on our own experiances with the E4500 and E10k (i have worked with one such a beast for one of my customers).
My, and our, apologies for the situation, we will try to be more vigilant in the future to avoid such situations. However they can never be fully avoided, even epinions.com reguarly gets faulty and non-unique user submissions. The only action you can take on this is remove the article in question as soon as posible.
Now first some coffee.. its way to early for such a headache..
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
But for anyone who questions if redir is indeed associated with ReviewBoard.com look here and search for "redir".
You'll notice that user's site info is given as "www.reviewboard.com" and the user's email is "philip@ferreira.net" which happens to be the same as the admin contact for reviewboard.com.
Come clean. Make real apologies. And we can all move on.
So this is a maturity contest now? I think I noted somewhere in this thread that it had become quite childish. Again you are kicking a dead horse, I've already agreed with AtariCommandCenter and told him that while I had my opinion, I was sorry for being wrong about his character. So you login, and post this anyway... plugging your site... nice touch. Fill with conviction.
-=Redir
http://auctionwatch.shopping.altavista.com/awdaily /reviews/321gone2.html
5 21 2&mode=nested
In addition, a person with the same name owns a website called 321gone.com. It doesn't entirely appear to be the same person, although I was halfway through writing an email to altavista indicated that they were the same and that 321gone.com is ran by a fraud.
Anyways, if anyone else wants to send an email off to altavista, who reviewed 321gone. here's what I started with.
Hi, you reviewed the site 321gone.com . If the owner is the same Philip Ferreira who has been more or less revealed as a fraud by the readers of the bizarre discussion group Slashdot. See
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/03/205
To sum it up, reviewboard.com, which is a fraudulent site, is registered to
Ferreira, Philip (PF2861) philip@GWI.NET
321gone.com is registered to
---
(different guy. I understand the power of witchhunts now. lol)
PS I wish that plain old text was the default, as is posts more than a paragraph have a good chance of being unreadable, this is a major usability problem
PPS 'lameness filter'? I was unaware that one single line of dashes was lame. wtf... ah well, at least it didn't get posted as an unintelligible run-on paragraph.
Go Kathryn Thurber!
for this sort of stuff surely underfloor wiring is the way to go, with access ports?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Please take a look at my reply
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
redir: you're off your rocker. give up
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Then what you have to do is very very simple.
Remember when you first joined epinions? Remember the big form they asked you to read and sign? Remember the bits in it authorizing them to take legal action against any site that uses your review without approval? Remember the bits asking you to inform them if you ever discover someone ripping off your review?
Excellent! Go here and report these violations, then sit back and let epinions' lawyers whip their asses.
Admit it, occasionally lawyers are good for something :)
Someone took away my score 1 on this comment? That's total abuse of the system, someone should metamoderate this... it's obvious someone is misusing their points here...
-=Redir
I've been running one of these for about a year now. Multiple domains, running oracle, sybase, web, and other apps. Some of them all on the same domain. While there are many good things with this fridge, there are many more poor things. Most of these stem from SUN's sales documents. Such as being able to upgrade hardware on a running domain. It is possible in very specific circumstances. I can't do it on my system, thanks to the dual fibre, and I was also unable to do it on the test machine at SUN. Of course, as most of you would know, once management get an idea in their head, no amout of technical details can persuade them it's not possible. Not that I'm at all bitter. Personaly I don't mind the E10K. I'd prefer having several smaller boxes clustered. Giving much more robustness and flexability than the E10K does. But then, I don't get to goto lunch with the sales guys that often..... Quigwbow
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Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2001 19:19:50 -0500
To: Josh McCormick (jmccorm@galaxy.galstar.com)
From: Dollar Dude
Subject: Re: MY WORK WAS PLAGIARIZED BY "CHRIS CHABOT"
In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Status: ORr
I bet, however this review has been on our site for over 2 months. You have a lot of sand to come to us and say you wrote this. Our review was posted 10/25/2000 at 1:57p.m. We moved it to the front cover of the site for a promotion we are doing on our server section.
At 05:57 PM 1/3/01 -0600, you wrote:
>RBMAG:3 A 4C813E-prod2
>
>I'm writing to you because it appears that a review that I wrote about the
>Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 was completely plagiarized and placed on your
>site. Please visit the following URL:
>
>http://www.epinions.com/enth-review-41-2D0E2BF6-
>
>Now visit the review on your site:
>
>http://www.reviewboard.com/Section/Cover/E10k
>
>Look just a little bit TOO FAMILIAR? I should know. I wrote the thing in
>the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep.
>
>I couldn't be MORE UPSET.
Yeah nice... everyone LOOK AT THE REVIEWBOAR D.COM I wasn't aware that mail headers inserted spaces in domain names... unless of course some idiot added them... he still can't product a valid email from the editor (as in the address) and claims that this dollar-dude one is the editor? How amusing.
-=Redir
Go ahead. Show me some of the trails of this so-called "well known" author on the web. I'd love to see some of this other articles. But I'm curious what a guy with a PHD in computer science would be doing as a lowly UNIX Admin. Yet he's very well known! Your story just doesn't hold water. I think I'm going to search the originating site for other plagairism at this point.
Oh please you can't possibly believe that this guy's review was stolen. It's absurd. His review was a theft and he posted a stolen review on epinions... then he yelled bloody murder becuase he was afraid that epinions would find out :p
-=Redir
OK let's look at your name... gayboy... shinji (I won't even go there) 1911 (Warez pup (razor)... hmm... do I care what you think? Nope because I'm flawed... I don't belong in the gene pool... thus since I finally realized that you are right, and I must be wrong, I figure why not go out like a fucking racist, troll bastard. Even though I'm not. Who cares, no one here is looking at the reality of the situation, which is this is so obviously some lamer epinion writer crap to get people to look at his story on epinions.com.. because why.. he gets paid to do it...
-=Redir
A5x00 disk arrays ship with Veritas for free. These are often used with E10k's.
There's a difference.... You could hook up an Ultra 2 to an A5000 and get Veritas VM free (of charge).
Steve.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I've installed a few, working for Sun. Sure they're complex; if you're buying one of these you don't want or expect an out-of-the-box install; you get project management, all sorts, configuring it to your exact requirements. Often people are buying their first E10k and don't really know what they're wanting to do with it (which is fun!), but they're damn' fine hardware, if you're serious enough to deal with them. Personally, I love working on them just because it's so scary to think what people will do to you if you screwed it up! I *thrive* on challenge! Steve.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Dude, are you saying that you post user comments written in the first person under your own name? So you weren't trying to plagiarize AtariDataCenter, just some poor user.
Redir is also the admin contact for your site. And someone was both emailing redir (at least he claims that in many messages, even though the turn around times are implausible) and changing the content of the article while you were "sleeping." Someone at reviewboard.com was working on this tonight.
You've got a better story now, but it still doesn't hold together. Given the credibility of your friend and the plagiarism put up under your name, I don't see any reason to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I am a linux fan, but have you ever read dot-truth.com? There are links to magazines that tell about the problems of Sun computers. It took forever for them to get ECC ready, while it's been on Intel's for years.
/etc/passwd with plain old vi too. Since most of these high-end servers aren't sitting next to someone's desk with a nice pretty 21" flat-panel LCD, why would you want something like vim? I don't recall WYSE terminals displaying syntax color-coding very well. Besides, even if you did want something like that, the Solaris package is available for download. I suppose you're going to complain about the lack of RPM, too.
;)
Uh-oh. Looks like we have a State 7 Linux User on our case.
Sparc is a lousy processor. 400 megahertz? And software support and development problems are also bad.
Cycle speed isn't everything, sport. Sparc processors are designed for high amounts of processing, higher than Intel. If Sun doesn't come out with a better-bigger-greater-faster CPU every two weeks, that doesn't mean they're falling behind; The latest UltraSPARC-2 and UltraSPARC-3 chips are EXTREMELY beefy processors, I'd rather be using one of those than this pentium 3 any day of the week (if cost wasnt an issue). Sun's software and hardware support is phenominal, by the way, if you've purchased a contract. I'll admit, I work for sun as an SSE, so take from this what you will... but usually you can't get a Compaq or Dell technician to your house because your PC won't deliver an email.
Solaris is so stripped down and has an inferior program for each part of it. Commercial X, csh, plain old vi, etc. are standard and it does not have standard Linux tools like Gimp. I would rather have a server which is similar to the workstation. My whole school is Sun, it's Northern Arizona University, and they have the slowest network!
*sigh* Do you honestly think that someone wants GIMP on a production Oracle/Informix database server? vim? and yes, it has csh. What's wrong with csh? If you want another shell, obviously you havent looked. Solaris comes with everything from ksh to bash. You can change it in
[some content removed] Sun computers are expensive, unreliable, slow, of a bad design, and are falling more behind each day. 500 MHz? A whole bunch of CPU's in one box? Scale out, not up.
Expensive, yes. But look at the market. Sun is not shooting for a demographic of a 13 year old kid who wants a nice computer to run this nifty program that the neighbor put on his computer called Linux. They're aiming to put out number-crunching, I/O passing monsters used for serving up lots and lots of data. The solution to being able to handle this amount of processes is not to make a single CPU be bigger, its to spread the processes out. Unreliable? if these were unreliable, why have people been buying Sun machines since the early 80's? I'll give you a hint: it's not because they suck.
Each person who ties their company into Sun is tying themselves in to ridiculously expensive proprietary technology. Amazon is now on Linux.
Amazon is on linux? Where did you get that idea?
For selling, hosting static pages, sharing information, databases, etc, Linux or Windows 2000 rules!
Thats great for a mom-and-pop ISP who needs an inexpensive solution to get themselves started and to have a good deal of room to grow with. Go to work for a company like AT&T for a few years and see the kind of data they push through their datacenters, and I'd dare you to say that again without laughing.
Die, Commercial Unix!!!!!!!!
No comment.
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
Either way, this whole thread has shown two things:
It depends on what you run. I have an E4500 hooked up to 6.4TB (usable) EMC that gets data ushed to it via SSH at 60MB/sec for 14 hours out of the day. On top of that, it's a NetBackup media server, putting ~10TB/week to tape from that array. it's a 10 x 400mHz, 5G machine, and never breaks 20 for load.
Compare and contrast the first paragraph of:
http://www.reviewboard.com/Section/Cover/E4500
with the "Highlights" section of the official Sun product page:
http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/e4500/index
The rest of the 4500 review is a copy of:
http://www.epinions.com/enth-review-5999-27A450
I've never met a school-a-holic who didn't tack every suffix he was entitled to onto his by-lines.
I smell fraud.
That's dynamic. The version I have here says meta name="DATE" content="2001-01-03 19:42:38".
Plugging my site? This looks like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Let's review what you have done, since you say that I have plugged my site - and compare.
- You plug an article on ReviewBoard.com.
redir writes "There is an interesting article on Reviewboard.com about Sun's bigboy E10k million dollar servers.
- It turns out that the article is a plagiarism of AtariDataCenter's work.
- You insult AtariDataCenter publicly and repeatedly
- L. Ron McKenzie points out that Whois lists the administrative contact for ReviewBoard as Philip Ferreira and that a certain redir (philip@ferreira.net) used to post to Slashdot.
... I believe this was on slashdot alittle while ago... The technique involves ... Accurate
(Score:1) by redir (philip@ferreira.net) on Wednesday April 21, @12 ...
So, yes, I put in a little plug for my site at the bottom of my post - with a little smiley face acknowledging that yes, this is a plug. The evidence points to you also making a plug for a site you are affiliated with (a site for which you are the administrative contact). But, look at the difference! And let's review your "apology":Whois info:
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact,
Billing Contact:
Ferreira, Philip (PF2861) philip@GWI.NET
Reviewboard Magazine
913 Elm Street, Suite 500
Manchester, NH 03101
603-625-1564
Google search for "philip ferreira" +slashdot turns up:
Slashdot:3D LCD Screen without Glasses
Redir: But yeah... I was wrong, an apology? No I am not sorry for having an opinion
Redir: Err... wait a minute... poor ataristickuphisass(sorry but I'm working out my anger guy) his article was ganked!!
sig: BeanShell: lightweight scripting for Ja
Our current content engine doesnt allow for user submissions. This has been and will be explained to anyone who submits content to us. Thus when i log in and post an article, it will always show up under my own name. As far as the 'benefit of the doubt' goes, this is not something i sought to obtain. This situation has shaken us up badly as well, and i wanted to apologies to the original author of the article, and make sure everyone knew he was in his right to claim he was, in fact, the author. The only thing i can do is take the false article offline, and state that we are sorry for the events that occured.
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
Anyone who knows Sun equipment knows that the E10k is the last to receive the latest and greatest. It is always released first for the lower-end servers.
I got an email from the editor about this guy, he claims he hasn't even gotten any email from him, and Chris Chabot is not a Phd. He said Chris is a software engineer that works with a few of these machines at his job in the netherlands. So this guy is outright lying about talking to him. I would also like to note that he can't produce an email address for the editor....
-=Redir
The Sun 10K wants to be a IBM S80 when it grows up and it can't even think about being an IBM SP
the dates there read the source html, in the headers. claims 2001-01-03 20:44:09
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
Good call firebus. I got a cached copy saved to my hardrive with the original 12/29/2000 date.
I quoted him... but didn't change the subject for benefit of the people scanning.
-=Redir
Hmm... I have a nice Sun 3/60 that lacks a hard drive (and, subsequently, an OS), but it's yours if you pay shipping. I figure - the model numbers are bizarrely close. The two systems must be copies of each other, right? :)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
One thing the E10k review gets right, is that a single domain can (largely) be treated as a single SPARC server. So much of the work that has been done on SPARC Linux would - I assume - still apply on an E10k domain. Note that this is pure assumption, because I have never worked on SPARC Linux, let alone on an E10k! Stick to Solaris for that beastie... by the time the Linux team (much as I love Linux for smaller systems) get around to Dynamic Reconfig, Alternate Pathing, etc, etc, etc, then I'll reconsider ...
Steve.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Also, the S/390 code is only really useful with binary-only drivers for lcs (3172, old OSA) and qdio (GB OSA). Until these drivers are available in full source, i wouldn't call the port complete ;-)
--jochen
This whole thread really has highlighted how objectiveness, respect, and honesty are essential qualities in life and especially in running a business.
It is admirable that redir will stand up in a public forum and try to defend his friends and he is obviously passionate and cares about his work (based on the intensity of his replies). These are all good qualities. I personally believe that redir/editor made a couple of silly mistakes at the start and from then on slid down a very slippery slope.
But that reinforces the lesson. Once you get on that slope, it's very difficult (and much more embarrassing) to get off. Redir/editor had a chance right from the start to fully disclose his relation with reviewboard.com. He had a chance to give Ataridatacenter respect and investigate AD's claim. If reviewboard.com had pulled the article from the start and maybe provided a link to epinions, I would have had the highest respect for reviewboard since they would have acted ethically.
Unfortunately, we know this is not what happened. And by trying to defend his friend, but not being polite, redir caused a lot of people to be upset with him. Worse and ironically, he has damaged the very reputation of reviewboard.com that he was trying to protect.
I know I probably sound a bit pompous in this post with a 'holier than thou' attitude and I apologise for this. However, situation/mistakes like this one are one of my pet peeves. Why? Because one of my team members was fired for doing something similar to redir. In my case, we support the national telco and his actions caused a major outage. As team leader, I tried to stop him getting him fired, but management and the client kept highlighting how he was deceitful, pig headed, did not confirm facts and was not willing to acknowledge that he had made a mistake (sound familiar to this situation?).
I honestly hope that redir learns from this experience and doesn't end up in a situation like my ex-team member.
Are you kidding? The Sun 4500 article was ganked from epinions too! You just replaced that after the scam came to light this morning! And what are you talking about Philip [i.e., you] only owned the domain name, his name is all over the site on the grand opening announcement archived on Google. I don't know if you're doing this as a joke at this point, like a weird performance art piece, or if you're just a compulsive liar.
You can also post the contact information for the person (if this person actually exists) that "submitted" this article to you.
Well, since the Xeon processors don't suffer from the cache problems that the Sun processors do, I would imagine that the uptime is pretty good.
How's the scalability on the E450 past 4 processors? Non-existent you say? You mean I'd have to spend $223,000.00 on a Sun to even begin to think about something beyond quad-processors? I could spend a 1/5 of that for an 8-processor Compaq/Dell/HP and get better tpc-c performance than the E4500.
The million dollar bet was bullshit and anybody with some sense knew it. Sun's best posted tpc-c score for a non-clustered server is ~150,000 for a 64-way E10k running Sybase for a cost of about $7,000,000. Compaq's best submitted performance for a 4-way server is ~35,000 with Win2k and SQL2k for around $500,000. So basically I get 1/4 the performance for 1/14 the price. Suns cluster really well, you say? The tpc-c number one position right now belongs to a clustered Compaq running Win2k and SQL2k.
Despite these numbers, I agree with you, but not on the basis of performance. When I let my own personal preferences and emotions come into play I like unix a whole lot better than I like Windows anything. As a matter of fact I despise Microsoft Server products, but that doesn't mean that they aren't faster and that they don't get good uptime. Most people's concepts of uptime are based on client systems and sub-optimal configurations that tend to go down. Microsoft server products can be optimized to be stable.
The fact remains that Sun is dropping the ball. Their most impressive hardware just isn't that impressive anymore. The USIII is way way late and not really very impressive. It is an incremental improvement over the USII. Fortunately, it does actually get more done per clock cycle than an Intel P3, but only slightly more. Hopefully they can get the clock speed up.
In the end, if I cared about cost, performance, and reliability I'd be more apt to run FreeBSD. If I were forced to run Oracle, I'd definitely consider Linux on Intel. If I needed to scale really well I'd probably use an HP9000 or an RS6000.
I still haven't seen anybody support an argument for why one would use a Sun Box for a particular application over Win2k on Intel. I can certainly think of a few, but that's me.
A few times, I got to play with a Sun computer. It always felt so much better than a PC, and I don't think it was pure psychology. Sun's architecture is newer (64-bit RISC) and more efficient (no 8-bit compatibility or PCI-ISA bridges etc.). While I know it may sound like a fancy, I would really like to have a Sun home. I use Linux quite a lot anyway, and games don't matter to me much. I'm sure many of you feel this way too.
Unfortunately, Sun chooses to distanciate itself from the general public by producing [excellent] million-dollars product. This is not wise. The high-price niche is an unstable location. I am sure that the market (us) would buy low-end Suns, if Sun chose to introduce them. This would be better even for Sun itself, because more people would know how to handle Solaris.
That's just my $0.02. I've now got to find $1,000,000.02 to buy this baby.
Since the operative phrase here is "in your own den", that implies a different level of power reliability being required. The point is that you can do it without hiring an electrician, as opposed to, say, a VAX 11/780, which I've heard requires 3-phase power. You don't even need to rack mount them; the two I worked with came shipped in a standalone configuration which worked quite well sitting on the wooden shipping pallets.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Jesus potzer. When executives make comments like this, they are using business logic rather than regular math. Your computer costs so much to run every minute; however this is offset by making money back merely by operating. It is holding an ethereal value of sorts. When you cause it not to operate you send the cost of operation shooting way above the amount of money you make (during normal operation). Since you're no longer inputting money your costs are not offset by an input of money. The imbalance causes your costs to soar and you start losing money like mad. There is a really nice calculus for this sort of mechanism but I can't remember it right now. Does anyone know the one I'm talking about? Anyways you don't need to make a million dollars a minute in order to lose a million dollars per minute.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Lots of people are probably wondering how this is relevant to the rest of us who can't afford this big iron. Here's why: just because you can't afford one today doesn't mean you shouldn't keep up on the architecture, since what's expensive today will be cheap tomorrow, and the architecture will keep marching on, building upon past models when forging tomorrow's. I know those years I spent in my forties playing with a CP/M prepared me for today's NT machines twenty years later, and both will help me when the next big thing comes down the pipeline.
Read the rest of this comment...
I wondered about the 480Mhz CPUs too cuz I've never heard of them. Really made me curious since we lose a 400 just about every week due to "e-cache writeback parity error" and there's never been a mention of "try the 480's" in any meetings or from our Sun reps to my knowledge. I asked a couple guys at werk and noone knew anything about 'em.
Has anyone tried to contact the epinions.com authors of the 450 and 4500 reviews? This E450 epinion (posted June 27, 2000) is quite similar to the reviewboard E450 posting. Likewise, this E4500 epinion (Aug 8, 2000) might as well be reviewboard's E4500 post. I believe both epinions were posted at times when the reviewboard posts were supposed to be unavailable.
give up already, you're the loser, everyone can see that by now
Don't stop at a S/390 Tim. Go Origin 3800! You want a seperate OS on each CPU don't you?
Unlike some people on slashdot who seem all to eager to throw phone numbers, residential addresses and real names out, i prefer to handle this within the confines of the company. This person will be contacted, and we will address these issues. However this does not warent a witch hunt by the community at large. And as i am the person who submited the article to the site, i am not gonna try to dodge the bullets and shout that people should flame some one else.
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
I would be really interested in knowing. Thank you!
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
Sun Enterprise 450 Server:
Epinions.com
ReviewBoard.com
Sun Enterprise 4500 Server:
Epinions.com
ReviewBoard.com
The latter article on RB seems as though it's being modified as I write this -- the META tag (which could mean anything) is stamped ten minutes ago. In fact, the article is no longer listed on their site! It was obviously there if I found it. Fortunately, I grabbed a snapshot of the articles and I have them posted here:
Saved review of the E450 Saved review of the E4500. Please don't Slashdot my poor cable modem!Epinions Review vs Reviewboard Review. The "CIO/CTO" paragraph was a good example.
BTW, has anyone else noticed how redir, the person who originally submitted the article, is so vigirous in defending the authenticity of the reviews? Amazing for someone who just found a really interesting article and then submitted it.
-LN
Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a bananna.
Thanks for the link. I *will* report this theft.
They don't require 48 outlets. There is a site review before install, but I'm pretty sure the chassis only needs two (220V) power cords.
The base price for their low-end "midrange server" is over $40,000. It has a single SPARC processor, and 1 GB of RAM. It appears to be exactly like a $5,000 Ultra5 Workstation, but in a much bigger box. (Personal refrigerator vs. pizza box) Am I overlooking something, or is this outrageously expensive? I'd just as soon get the Ultra5 and then buy myself one of Cogent Communications' 100 Mbps Fiber lines for $1,000 a month.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
How about some performance numbers? For example, how well does Oracle run on these boxes (a common use for boxes like this)?
do a whois on reviewboard.com.
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Billing Contact:
Ferreira, Philip (PF2861) philip@GWI.NET
Reviewboard Magazine
913 Elm Street, Suite 500
Manchester, NH 03101
603-625-1564
Then do a google search on Philip Ferreira. Or, better yet, on both Philip Ferreira and slashdot. Seems like our buddy redir used to post to slashdot using both his username and email address...% 22+%2Bslashdot&hl=en&lr=&safe=off
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22philip+ferreira
You've got a special line to this editor? He doesn't leave me nearly as many eamil as he did you, a random user of his site who happened to submit the articles to Slashdot in the first place.
As I am saying before, I would not say that AD is telling the truth, however, nor would I say that he is lying. There is enough evidence both ways to say that either could be telling the truth.
In which case, one should keep an open mind and see where AD's enquiries lead him.
Let's see. Would it be more likely that the "editor" or an unknown magazile would steal an article and try to get it published on Slashdot to make a great deal of money on advertisement revenues, or someone would bring up the connection to a view that they created on a view site in order to protect less than $1 in revenue? You tell me.
Please come up with another story to explain this. I'm waiting for a good laugh about the 480mhz processors available in March of 2000... especially since I can't even get them for the E10k (only the E450) right now.
I can't believe that powering off such a machine is as easy as pulling -ONE- power cord. Our group deploys several dual processor SUN E250 servers (the lowest-end SUN server you can find). Each of those has two redundant power supplies. If you pull one of the cords, the machine is supposed to keep on working. I can't imagine how Sun could ship a machine that is much much higher-end than E250 with only single power supplies.
Sure, why not?
From philip@reviewboard.com Wed Jan 3 20:36:55 2001
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From: Philip Ferreira
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... but AtariDatacenter may be right. I'm posting only because I have an established history on Slashdot and absolutely zero connection to AtariDatacenter or redir.
Consider this a neutral third party observation to document something before it can be changed.
From http://www.reviewboard.com/Section/Cover/E4500, paragraph two:
From http://www.epinions.com/enth-review-5999-27A4508B- 39906C31-prod5, paragraph 1:
The Epinions date is listed as Aug 8 2000. No date was available for the reviewboard article. The Epinions author (nightfall) is not the same author as the disputed E10000 article (jmccorm).
Try that with Windows...
I am a linux fan, but have you ever read dot-truth.com? There are links to magazines that tell about the problems of Sun computers. It took forever for them to get ECC ready, while it's been on Intel's for years.
Note that dot-truth.com is really a microsoft site. I doubt its going to be particularly objective about problems with Sun machines!
--
nosig
by redir (philip@ferreira.net) on Saturday April 24, @07:56AM EDT
(User Info) http://www.reviewboard.com
This is too funny. Thanks for the good research! Nice how redir posted some messages with his address for the redir alias as the administrative contact of Reviewboard Magazine! If this doesn't clinch things, what does?
The biggest limitation that I found on the one that we had (we let the lease and replaced it with a bunch of 6500s) is difficulty on using SCSI storage. Each system board only has 3 SBUS slots. Your first two board will each have one netword card (hme or qfe) apiece. That leaves a maximum of 4 UDWIS ports for two boards. Typically two of those are used for the boot disks, leaving you with a problem.
Since there is no way to add expansion slots without adding system boards, and system boards need CPU and memory, adding storage tends to be more expensive than necessary.
That being said, in the right situation, with the right planning, they are the right solution. I personally found it to be too much of a hassle for what we were using it for.
As for the 450s, they are designed for I/O, period. Yes, 20 internal disks on 5 ultra wide SCSI channels is nice, Remember though, that you can also add quite a few PCI cards (I think 8). Picture one of these stuffed with 8 PCI dual channel ultra wide SCSI cards, with each channel hooked up to a 100 GB tray, and you have one wickedly high bandwidth server.
- I also really like the design of the casing plastic and ironmorgery of the E450s
I'll agree that they're built like a rock (I've actually used one for a surfboard on a ramp in our computer room) but the damn plastic front door that covers the floppy and CDROM drives is a bitch to get closed right, and its flimsy hinge loves to break and fall off.Let's also not forget that the backplanes and SCSI cards for 16 of those disk drives is not included with the base unit. You'll wind up purchasing them seperately (2 boards and 2 cards to support 8 drives each) and installing them yourself (expect it to cost 3-4x as much as similar PC hardware)
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Well in reply, I think its relative to what they are refering to, this machine for example does all of a certain large airlines entire passenger and revenue database, as well as other airlines, so its not just for 1 company.
It's a pretty nice, very fast machine... however, it is BIG, COMPLEX, and EXPENSIVE. Any company looking at this should think a LOOONG hard time. They should evaluate:
Are they willing to pay for the extra training AND for experience time before the system goes live? Think at least 5 man-weeks per operator minimum.
Do they realize that you lose MANY of the coolest features (Dynamic re-configuration) with many of the most common setups? (clusters, fiber-channel fabrics)
Do they understand that part of the issue is the storage, and that the amount of storage complexity to fully utilize one of these beasts can be quite large? An E10K will often be set up with Veritas, or sam-fs, or brocade switches. This is a BIG change from a few linux boxes with SCSI raid arrays. Make sure your people can handle it.
They should REALLY wonder if they wouldn't be better off with one of the smaller (450, 4500 etc) SUN boxes instead.
In other words, do you REALLY need this much power, because that much power not only costs in up front dollars, it costs alot to actually keep it running and to take advantage of that much power.
-Anonymous for a reason
Apparently the Cache problems have been fixed with the following patches:
Solaris 2.5.1 103640-34
Solaris 2.6 105181-23
Solaris 7 106541-13
Solaris 8 108528-04
I don't know if linux is susceptible to that fault.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
Er, I think you'll find it is required to step up from 110V if you want to get higher wattage with less amps. See Ohm's law.
Besides, why do you only want to use one wallpoint? You don't want a tripped circuit breaker bringing your box down :-). However, it is still vulnerable to the "idiot operator tripping over the power cord" DOS attack.
I believe the hardware is now called xServer (or x-server, x/Server, or something - you get the idea). These are 9672-Gn mainframes, but you can still buy some recent models as S/390s.
Similarly, the native OS software for the x-Server line is now termed x/OS (or X/OS, x/os, whatever) instead of OS/390 (MVS and VM), which had been brands since the 70s. I haven't paid much attention to the details of spelling, etc., but just wanted to point this out. Then there's the de facto x/Linux OS supported in the 2.4 kernel... as everyone here already knows.
[Hmmm, now I'm going to have to change my Slashdot ID, too.]
Its too bad that Support Contracts for E10K are now up to almost $800,000.00 / year now... You must have one certified E10K person to work on them or you void waurantee.
:)
On a side note, these machines do rock... I work on two E10K's at work each running 4 domains with 2-3 system boards per domain... They are rock solid and dont have a lick of problems with the machines themselves... (Only problems I really run into are the people that act like they are sysadmins that aren't
Those facts are now outdated. Sun came out with the 256Meg Simms a few months ago... Each System board has 4 memory banks (each bank having 8 slots) Just a quick FYI for those companies out there with alot of money...
Also remember that in order to be able to use DR is that you must have one floater board so that you can empty out memory and processing from one board to another... But still, the advantages GREATLY outweight the disadvantages of the loss of one system board... And that one system board is ususable by all domsins (only one at a time though)
Sarcasm is the recourse of a weak mind...
--
The A1000 is rated at 7A, IIRC, and the E4500 is rated at 12A. If you managed to get a second E4500 and a 21" monitor on 15A (7 + 12 + 12 + monitor > 31A), it's certainly not a wise solution.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Can I just ask a question. How's the uptime on your Compaq quad processor Xeon MS Sql box.
How's the scalability on those compaq's too? Past 8 processors?
This argument gets old, people always bitch about Sun boxen but the fact of the matter is, if you can afford a Sun box and you care about uptime and reliability, you'll most likely pick a Sun based platform instead of Intel, and a Sun/Oracle based software platform instead of Win2k and MS SQL.
Remember the million dollar bet by Larry Elison? If someone can benchmark MS SQL coming within 1/100th of the performance as Oracle he'll pay them 1 million dollars.
They did, at 1/16th the cost to get within 1/100th of the performance.
This is one of the funnest threads I've followed in /. for a long time. Doing a Google search on AtariDatacenter's real email string comes up with enough postings on geek topics that it seems highly credile that the owner of that email could have written the review. The best data point is this resume.
Doing the same thing for "Chris Chabot", the supposed author of the Review Board article does turn up a couple of semi-sophisticated computer related hits (needs help compiling a kernel), but in these cases Chris has a Review Board email address! ---> chabotc@reviewboard.com
I very much doubt that the review board is running a Sun E10K.
It seems pretty damn certain that the Review Board plagarized these articles. Since "redir" was also the original submitter and a strident attacker of AD, I would give fat odds, that he is "Chris Chabot" or at least a buddy of his.
But you got to hand it to the guy. Redir is a great handle for someone who redirects content from one site to another.
New job gave me a PC keyboard and within 6 months I had repetitive-stress tendonitis (aka "Emacs Pinky"). Now I have a Kinesis ergonomic and things are getting slowly better.
Oh, and you're still not going to see the I/O (or even backplane, iirc) throughput on PC hardware that you can get on a good Sun server.
Michael J.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
From Google, looking up info on Chris Chabot, I found a reference to a site on "rb.chabotc.com". If you go there, you'll find a slightly older copy of Reviewboard. It has a link to the E10K article at http://rb.chabotc.com/Section/Cover/E10k. And on that article, you'll find that it lists the date of the configuration availability as "12/29/00".
One of the points of contention in this discussion has been that someone said they thought it originally said 12/29/00, then changed to 3/29/00. The discrepency between rb.chabotc.com's and reviewboard.com's article is further proof of ReviewBoard's lie and coverup. I hope other people will post verification of what I'm saying before the copy on rb.chabotc.com is changed again. Meta date tag I'm looking at says 2001-01-02 17:58:27. That date is not dynamically updated as another newbie pointed out, as you can see from looking at other reviews on RB.
You'll also find Chris Chabot, the allegedly reported admin of hundreds of Sun 10Ks, to have written reviews of laptops for Reviewboard, and even the article announcing the grand opening of Reviewboard! Sorry Chris, can't change that one, it's archived on Google.
Chris also used to post on occasion on Slashdot, under user chabotc, and has posted help requests to a linux-kernal mailing list.
hey looking and lusting @ these machines I only have one problem the OS they use is not GPL
why dont they GPL solaris ?
because they claim of all the drivers for custom boards they want to release information that their competitors might use !
but this argument is slightly wrong
consider Nvidia's binary kernel for linux they dont want to give away information and they do it because they can I am sure that they could do the same thing for solaris
what about giveing away their own hardware specs and IP err just use the method above for their own hardware as well
the SPARC is an ISO standard and the LEON for the euro space agancy shows an implementation of this software cant be patented in the rest of the world (europe) and keep the hardware seprate by above methods
solaris has had the API's for device drivers put out people can use them and write drivers
giveing people the source allows them to tune for what the server is used for SUN USED to give the source and now does but under a bad licence
honestly what is the problem ?
SUN could be seen as a leading light in the server market
SUN is already trusted by the "IT" managers but the geeks run linux
get the geeks release the source !!
regards
john jones
In about the middle of Summer 2000, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) came out with the Onyx 3000 and Origin 3000 machines. The "O3K" can take up to 1024 CPUs and 2 TERABYTES of RAM as a single system. For those that want some flexability, it can be "clustered" or segmented into smaller virtual machines in hardware, each running a different OS or different hardware/software configuration. The standard "node boards" that contain CPUs and RAM have 4x MIPS R12000A CPUs running at 400 MHz and with 8 MB L2 cache. A single R12KA/400 compares well in floating point to a 1.0 - 1.3 GHz Pentium III or Athlon. The R14K is due soon, with twice the L2 thruput and higher clockspeeds. The whole system is very modular, made up of various 19" rackmount "bricks" linked together by NUMA-3/Craylink cables. Total system bandwidth on a 512 CPU system is 714.00 GB/sec. From what I understand (I really only work with the much older Origin 2000 series), the standard max configuration is 512 CPUs / 1 TB RAM, but can support twice that with an additional megarouter brick. Expensive machines, but total monsters... and the price per CPU and price to raw power is much better than that of Sun Enterprise. Onyx systems are made by adding one or more InfiniteReality 3 graphics subsystems to an Origin. These SGI systems run IRIX 6.5.X, a real version of unix. Lots of freeware, gcc, etc, can be found for IRIX at http://freeware.sgi.com. Freeware is updated quarterly, the same timeframe as IRIX. Full commercial developer tools (LOADS!) plus an included year of support, software updates, etc, can be had by joining the SGI developer program at the 'Venture' level for $900.
Guess what? Well, to paraphrase some rather famous person (I think), copyright infringement is the sincerest form of flattery - it appears that whole paragraphs from my review have magically appeared in Mr. Chabot's review. I'm extremely pissed off about this, to put it mildly. I sent Epinions an e-mail about this, and hopefully they'll do something suitably nasty, but in the meantime I've sent my own rather scathing e-mail to the folks at Reviewboard.
Now, for something a bit on the brighter side - I've contacted my lawyer regarding this, and it turns out that we may be eligable for damages! That's right - you see, Reviewboard uses banner advertisements. They actually receive money for each person that sees this review. There's probably little that can be done for the majority of the time that these reviews have been up - after all, they're not obligated to review each review for potential copyright infringement - but once they've been notified of the infringement they're obligated to take care of the situation, either by ensuring that no infringement exists or by removing the infringing material. Apparently (and if anyone else knows a lawyer - or is one - who has a differing view, please let me know. I'm always interested in second opinions), once they've been notified, we're eligible to receive damages from them starting from the time that they were notified.
If you hear anything from Reviewboard or from Epinions about this, please let me know - I'd like to keep abreast of the situation. I wasn't sure if the address you have on Slashdot is true (somehow, comments@netscape.net strikes me as a mighty nice SPAM director) :)
If all of what my lawyer says is true, then now we get to the cool part. These reviews were on Slashdot. You know what that means?
So do I. :)
CNLadd
--
--
Welcome to the land of the easily amused...
Oracle on Solaris is great, but even that can take an eternity to load on a monster system. The daemon must have had so much to look into when it first launched. The warehouse was 3 terabytes last time I saw it.
Developers: We can use your help.
i have an e4500 with 8 cpus, 2 gigs of ram, and tons of disk space, it is DOG SLOW! if the software architecture has been cleanly designed, it will be running on a dual 500mhz system and 1 gig of ram with no sweat. hardware can only take you so much, a well design architecture will take you to whereever you want to go...
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
There is another loose end that you need to tie up for the /. community. If this was a simple case of not checking a user submission (and misattributing it), how come reviewboard.com was changing the article over the course of the evening to match redir's posts?
My favorite part about the article: The popup ad window when you hit the back button.
I am simply stating what the head Oracle DBA told me, I figure those guys would have a pretty good idea of what that information was worth. You gotta figure those machines do a lot if you gotta have a weight and retna scan just to get into the datacenter
No, because a Beowulf cluster (by definition) uses an Open Source OS, and Solaris is not Open Source.
Why waste time drooling over one of these when you could be lamenting your lack of an AlphaServer GS320? Let's compare the two, shall we?
The E10k can have more processors than the GS320, but they're not nearly as fast as the Alphas. Besides, memory bandwidth, and in parallel applications inter-processor communication (which is often just shared memory updates) is the kicker (who cares how many processors you have if they're all waiting?). The GS has more local memory bandwidth per processor and more inter-processor bandwidth than the E10k or (AFAIK) anything else.
[Yes, I work for Compaq; no, I'm not a marketroid; I'm an engineer in the Alpha microprocessor group.]
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
In addition to your statement, the following circumstantial evidence has been mentioned in the mess of posts in this thread. These include:
- the fact that the administrative contact of the reviewboard.com domain is likely to be redir (by L McKenzie).
- a date in the article mysteriously changed from 12/29/2000 to 03/29/2000 (Tim confirmed change after viewing cached copy).
- my observation that the writing styles are different between the three Sun server articles despite the fact that the 'author' is the same.
- the fact that the author had access to a E10000 server many many months before it became available. Sure, some sites get advance equipment for review, but I find it highly unlikely that reviewboard would get a $1 million server to review.
- redir rather strident defence of an article that he casually wandered across and submitted to Slashdot. This in itself could be ignored except if you remember that redir is the administrative contact of the reviewboard.com domain
....
Sure, none of it is definitive evidence, but the amount of circumstantial evidence sure is beginning to lend credibility to Ataridatacenters claimMy company spent $100,000 and all I got was 16 cpu boards, 64Gb RAM, and this lousy t-shirt.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
And what about that guff about a kernel compile taking less than 5 seconds!!
How long does an infinite loop take?
Here's a comparison:
Sun vs SGI
I had to check back before I went to sleep. I saw that post about rb.chabotc.com and damn if it doesn't look bad for RB. I've got nothing more to say about it, I'm dissapointed, I sent an email to the editor and he's probably sleeping like normal people do at this time of night, so I'll wait to hear what the reasons are. Looks like I was wrong (ouch) someone give me some moderation points for saying that it hurt!
-=Redir
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
You certainly owe AtariDatacenter an apology.
Given all the evidence that you, redir, are also part of the Review Board, I think that you owe Slashdot an apology as well.
Admit your mistakes. You'll feel better.
Simple. I was pissed and I wanted to be right. I had no clue what really happened as I couldn't get ahold of Chris, so I manipulated our system with a few 'update mytable set date where id =''s and swore up and down it was false. Why? Because I've known Chris for ten years and absolutely knew he'd never do something like that. I was wrong to do it, but I wanted to drive home the fact that he didn't steal an article. When people started emailing me with solid information I thought "I shouldn't have done what I just did" but it was too late at that point. Bottom line is I was wrong to back Chris up in that matter, I couldn't get ahold of him and I tried to cover his ass. For the record, Philip Ferreira does not own Reviewboard.com a lot of you info posting trolls have issues reading anything except the article in question. I'm the admin/tech/billing contact for the domain because I'm the editor. The domain itself is actually registered to the previous owner of the site, and the site is held by a corporation now (Reviewboard.com, LLC) which I am not a stockholder or owner of. Another thing you should know, is while I may be in charge here, I'm 24 years old, and I don't have all of the correct answers when it comes to doing things. I handled this very poorly, and chances are at some future date I might mishandle something else. However from this point on, all I can do is try to handle it with class, and attempt to find out all the details instead of being so defensive about something like this. I still don't agree with the posting of information (however dated it might be (as we aren't even in that state anymore)), I especially don't agree with moderators mod'ing personal information up (shows lack of character in my opinion). But I'll let it slide because perhaps this time I deserve it due to my roll in this. In summeray and For the record: I had no idea or clue prior to the emails I got from /. community that this article was a copy of another article.
2) There were enough differences in the article to make any reasonable person doubt an email from an outside organization, claiming the contrary.
3)I did make the wrong decision and attempt to cover Chris's butt. When I found out that it was indeed true, I actually called Chris up at 4:30am his time and screamed, then he told me that it was a user submission and things began to fall into place.
4) When I did find out for sure that it was not Chris's article we took the article down. I set Chris on writing our own version of the article, for two reasons. 1) Because we had the content there, and I didn't want to not have it and have to definalize the section again for lack of content. 2) I wanted to show people that we could review this system with equal intensity (As you can plainly see in Chris's original Review of the E450.
I hope this clears this matter up for good. Ataridatacenter is owed our most sincere appology, which I want to take this opportunity to give him (I'm very sorry AD, I really didn't believe that this could happen given who was involved).
-Kind Regards
ah no that's not me lewser.
-=Redir
L. Ron McKenzie points out that the person who submitted the story (rdir) and defended its authenticity would seem to be the administrative and technical contact of the site which has the review.
There are also the posts (#1, #2, and #3) which point to the date being changed from 12/29/00 to 3/29/00 in the published article... after the authenticity of the article was questioned. Of course, the story doesn't make any sense at all with the date and the CPU speeds changed.
Dustpuppy correctly points out the difference in writing styles between the reviews. A nice non-technical investigation of the situation. Thanks.
And there are numerous posts, such as this, which point out strange similarites between the reviews on Reviewboard and those written by people on Epinions. And a credibility check betweem the alleged author and myself. This recently posted thread seems to be pretty damning, too.
I think at this point, the plantiff rests his case. And I'm going to be. 'Night, Slashdot. And thanks for those who were looking for the truth who helped me prove my case. I appreciate it.
What about the Sun 420R?
We do not reccommend the 450 for use in our Data center as they are physically large. The 420R provides basically similar hardware levels and comes in a nice small rackmount case (4U). As we use Fibre Channel connected EMC frames for storage the lack of internal drive bays is not a problem.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
it's critical to realize that these boxes, while impressive, are mainframes, not supercomputers. for instance, if you look at the 64-way E10K Stream score, you realize each CPU is seeing a measly 150 MB/s or so! these are clearly machines designed mainly for driving big IO, not running applications that need more than trivial memory bandwidth.
What I would like to know is, how does the free software community work on making Linux work on big expensive machines like this? I mean, its mostly a network of volunteers, and presumably they can't all have a supercomputer each to work on, so how do they do it? Is most of the work on Linux at this level done by big companies that can afford it like IBM, or is there a place for the smaller Linux developer and enthusiast?
Considering the fact that it is very unlikely that there are several hackers (heck, even one) who can afford to buy a $100,000 to $1,000,000 piece of hardware and invalidate the warranty simply to test the viability of porting Linux, I doubt that anyone outside of commercial developers are working on Linux on mainframes.
A quick search on Google for "supercomputer" & "linux" pulls up the IBM machines and a bunch of Beowulf style clusters and not much else. Interestingly most of the IBM links are to Los Lobos, IBM's clustered supercomputer.
Oops, I just did a search for "linux" & "mainframe" and found better links which look like they may point to some enthusiast sites after all, such as ROAM. There are also links to Suse's and IBM's mainframe linux products to be found.
Grabel's Law
I am working under the assumption that redir = Ferreira, Philip = "the real editor"
Thanks for coming clean. I wish you had used your nick just to clear up the loose ends, but this last post did demonstrate class. Keep that up even when (and it seems likely) you get more flames over this.
We all fuck up. It's time to move on and begin working to re-establish some credibility. And credibility is the most important asset for a site like ReviewBoard.com. I hope RB puts in some serious review procedures after this.
(Moderators, if you're still here: mod up that AC post above. It is the last chapter to a very intersting story.)
They could be worth say... 50 million... and if they are down, they could be on the hook for contract violations where they loose a million a minute. In that case they would be out of business in just shy of an hour :)... and still be GM
Perspective it's all about perspective
-=Redir
there was a less than sign in there, I should have known it would strip that... so I meant "and still be less than GM(period). Then... Perspective... it's all about perspective. P.S. yes I feel silly :)
-=Redir
Purdue University's Engineering Computer Network maintains several of these for the various engineering schools and their research groups on campus. The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering had ten of them the last time I counted, but I know that they have more now. Many of the other Schools of Engineering have a few as well, and some of the ECE research groups have one or two to themselves. ECN suggested these machines for the same reasons as the review likes them: they are small, have a lot of capability to be upgraded, and can be made very powerful. Just watch out for the price tag... :-)
The fact that you can't even post a coherent insult is ... sadly amusing. And only serves to validate my point. Haha. And isn't it funny how you keep saying that this is some lamer trolling for his EOpinion writeup -- and then give no response to the actual points he makes. But whatever. Don't bother replying, I won't be reading your pathetic responses -- I've spent enough time dealing with morons and jackasses this week already.
... I have only one thing to say...
:)
*smack*
This machine IS a Beowulf Cluster! DUH!
Of course, it's one in an extremely spiffy and compact box, but still! The fact that you can "domain" the thing, what makes it any different from those... *retch* 16 node iMac clusters? Essentially, none
Didn't Alpha finally go the brainiac route with the latest model? I'm pretty sure it is an out-of-order processor.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Let's see... I can drop a soundcard and a TV-Out card in this and make it one mother of a multimedia server! It'd even go nice in my house as a heater.
Probably the one flaw of the 450 is that there's no hardware RAID controller for it. Admittedly you can run those 20 drives on Veritas File Manager or (gag) DiskSuite, but hardware RAID would give the 450 a performance boost, making it a truly outstanding I/O box.
A Sun sales rep will tell you that the E10k is a scalable flexible near infinitely configurable enterprise solution. He'd be right on everything except the word enterprise...
Then in the next paragraph, it says:
We rank this product with 3 stars, but only for high-end enterprise situations.
Doh.
I think not... I read his review some time ago... Now to find out when the topic article was published. Ah what the hell, I agree, give it to the lawyers...
Sparc may be 400 MHz, but it's also got four or eight times as much L2 cache as the X86. So while the X86 is twiddling its thumbs waiting for something from RAM, Sparc is still working. It's very hare-and-tortoise.
And software support and development problems are also bad.
Software support is fine, unless you're an L337 G^|\/|3r. What professional software is out there that doesn't at least have a Solaris-compatible alternative?
As for development problems, I submit that Sun releases software more slowly than Microsoft because Sun actually bothers to debug their software.
Solaris is so stripped down and has an inferior program for each part of it. Commercial X, csh, plain old vi, etc. are standard and it does not have standard Linux tools like Gimp.
Solaris is stripped down because most of Sun's customers don't want a lot of cruft bundled with their server OS. If you need Gimp, go get it from http://www.sunfreeware.com.
I would rather have a server which is similar to the workstation.
Really? Why?
My whole school is Sun, it's Northern Arizona University, and they have the slowest network! They do have Windows Workstations, but the Sun computers in the CSE lab are ridiculous! They don't have anything that have become standard in Linux distributions. How will we ever be taught about the high level programs the end user deals with or the websites, when we don't even have a graphics tool comparable to Microsoft Paint. Let us have Linux and Oracle/mySQL, GIMP, bash, word processing/office programs, multimedia, etc.
This sounds like a NASU problem, not a Sun problem. If no one can be bothered to download or compile the Gnu stuff, do it yourself. Bash is standard as of Solaris 7. StarOffice is available for free from the Sun site. Last I checked, Oracle/mySQL were fricking expensive; can't help you there.
Sun computers are expensive,
True.
unreliable,
You're kidding, right? We measure uptime in years. We have to keep careful records because customers call us for help with their Sparc 20 mailserver that's been running without fail for four years, and no one can remember the root password.
slow
No, but see "expensive" above.
of a bad design, and are falling more behind each day. 500 MHz? A whole bunch of CPU's in one box? Scale out, not up.
So what you're saying is, rather than put several CPUs in a box, just have one faster CPU? What's faster, 4 1GHz procs, or 64 400MHz procs?
Or maybe you mean we should just buy more boxes. Hm, maybe Sun isn't that much more expensive after all.
Each person who ties their company into Sun is tying themselves in to ridiculously expensive proprietary technology.
It may be proprietary, but Sun doesn't abuse its customers the way Microsoft does, and there's something to be said for an OS that wasn't written by zillions of anonymous programmers.
Amazon is now on Linux. For selling, hosting static pages, sharing information, databases, etc, Linux or Windows 2000 rules!
Well, not Win2k, unless uptime isn't important to you.
. .
Both the Sun E 10000 (no doubt the attraction of the piece) and the E 4500 have been around a while now, as these slightly longer reviews from 1999 remind me. I expect there will have been numerous updates to shipping variations since launch, nonetheless, which I won't check with Sun's docs right now.
Neither yet support the Ultra Sparc 3, which is the chip and associated ( potentially) massively (1024) SMP platform probably of most interest to anyone evaluating entreprise scale systems right now. Whether Sun have yet fixed the memory / cache problems which apparently still persist, despite numerous fixes, for the USII I can't tell. But if anyone can post a quick summary comparison of cache design between the two chips, and whether there might be a replay of the well publicised memory problems, that'd be darn nifty. US3 has yet to ship in volume with servers, so there may not be any occasional user reports out there for a while.
Personally, I would rather see a story on Ask /. trying to find someone who could write even a short review (particularly of the E 10000) from production environment experience. The story links did not do much for me. I would not be surpised however if Sun has NDAs preventing real world reviews as part of mandatory support contracts for their big iron.
Oh, and for those of you interested in clusters, here's a related snippet :)
hello Philip
Even though my company owns several E10K machines, I do most of my work on a E450. So that's what I read up on. Check out this blurb from http://www.reviewboard.com/Section/Cover/SunE450
All in all these tests have shown us that the Linux software/Sun hardware is a very viable solution, usefull specialy when you run a Linux based shop, while still requiring the I/O performance and stability the Sun hardware can provide you. Most customers however will likely stick to the Sun Solaris platform, but its allways good to have options.
Now all I need to do is get one of these for the house. *Shaking Piggybank* Well, it'll be a while I guess.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Well, save up your pennies, because you can run a well loaded E4500 system (including a nice 21" display) from a single 15A 117 VAC wall plug. I've done it. Two E4500's, a 21" monitor, and a 4-disk A1000 disk unit, to be exact.
Although 220 VAC is preferred to give you higher wattage with less amps, it is definitely not required.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Check this page
No in truth you pay through the nose for the software. They will release the code but they won't GPL it and god have mercy on your soul if you do anything they don't like with it.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Hi, Have anybody seen any sun server with UEIII roadmap. I remember seeing it on sun website long time (more then a year, huh.) back but I do not see it anywhere. It seems they are silently releasing new machines based on UEIII CPU.
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I'd love to have a machine full of the most expensive parts, 12 foot cooling fans and a tendency to kernel panic. Mmm, yummy!
The starfires are neat things. I got to play with one (ie, take it apart, put it together, etc) at Sun's office in Maryland. The road to purchasing one of these is long, you need to take special starfire classes at Sun's centers, your server room needs to be "blessed" by Sun for power (i think they require 48 outlets), etc. They clearly don't want the average moron owning one of these. Reminds me of how Ferrari "chose" the top customers for the privledge of leasing an F50. Rumor has it that the next gen Starfire will support 128 cpu's (so friends inside Sun tell me). Can't wait for the TPC-C benchmarks of that system...
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
"That 400 megahertz processor operates on about 4 times more CPU instructions per clock cycle than your X86 chip."
In theory, yes, but in practice Sparcs have never been very successful at getting the theoretical issue rate out of real code. The fight between "brainiacs" (like SPARC & PPC which try for high issue rates at the expense of clock speed) and "speed demons" (like the Alpha, which tries for the highest possible clock rates) is constantly won by the speed demon camp. Look at the historical performance of the Sparcs on (say) the SPECmarks (which granted, are not perfect, but they're certainly adequate for evaluating CPU cores if not memory systems).
Umm the editor said in one of the mails that they got it early. Just like a lot of the reviews they do. They had a P3 500 notebook review out before they came out dude... so is there something else you want to say that is ignorant because you can't read. The email I am quoting was something YOU QUOTED The editor saying or what it the other guy up there... whoever quoted the editor saying whatever that's where it was..
-=Redir
Yeah after you have offended me, and have been completely ignorant you've made this my new hobby. I love roasting you out in public for your stupidity like the comment that I lied, when the editor clearly said they got the machine early. You are a clown and I bet you are the idiot that is claiming he wrote the article. Is this really your second account, come on you can tell the truth.
-=Redir
ahah you know what man... you're just jealous you don't have one to play with. Go cry in someone else's corner I thought the review was informative, and it left me thinking about what I could pawn to get one of these beasts.
-=Redir
All the sudden, this ends up as a review with a different author at another web site? What the HELL is going on? If you have questions, please EMAIL ME. jmccorm@galstar.com
This REALLY PISSES ME OFF! MY article pre-dates theirs. Hell, I should know. I wrote it in the middle of the night. And I don't see any date on their publication. I'm assuming it was published today or yesterday. I demand credit for my work. Hell, this is worth an article.
Who cares, you don't know what this guy is doing, or what qualifications he has, you are talking out your ass, he is obviously well informed he wrote the article. It's shit like this that proves you are ignorant, you base your entire theory (pathetic as it is) on assumptions you are making about someone you don't know, and have no contact with. Then you expect me to take you credibly. It's absolutely crazy.
-=Redir
Sparc is a lousy processor. 400 megahertz? And software support and development problems are also bad.
Solaris is so stripped down and has an inferior program for each part of it. Commercial X, csh, plain old vi, etc. are standard and it does not have standard Linux tools like Gimp. I would rather have a server which is similar to the workstation. My whole school is Sun, it's Northern Arizona University, and they have the slowest network! They do have Windows Workstations, but the Sun computers in the CSE lab are ridiculous! They don't have anything that have become standard in Linux distributions. How will we ever be taught about the high level programs the end user deals with or the websites, when we don't even have a graphics tool comparable to Microsoft Paint. Let us have Linux and Oracle/mySQL, GIMP, bash, word processing/office programs, multimedia, etc.
Sun computers are expensive, unreliable, slow, of a bad design, and are falling more behind each day. 500 MHz? A whole bunch of CPU's in one box? Scale out, not up.
Each person who ties their company into Sun is tying themselves in to ridiculously expensive proprietary technology. Amazon is now on Linux. For selling, hosting static pages, sharing information, databases, etc, Linux or Windows 2000 rules!
Die, Commercial Unix!!!!!!!!
Of course, I'm wondering why the editor got it, and not the author of the article. Further, I'm wondering why the author of the article says they're available "now", when he wrote it in March of 2000.
How many more holes do I have to blow through this story before you give up?
We have over 170 Sun servers, ranging from the
:-)
measly 220R (dual-CPU, 2 gig of RAM) through the mighty E10K (64 CPU/64 gig RAM/20TB total storage)
Since the article concentrates on the E10K, I will too. It's a BEAUTIFUL piece of engineering. If you're really interested, look into the design of the centerplace. It's a switched, VERY high bandwidth fabric, and basically allows the flexibility associated with the 10K.
The fact that the Enterprise-class CPU's work on anything from a 3500 through the 10K is also impressive. Memory boards are the same, too.
As for the person who said that Fibre storage restricts some of the best features of the 10K - that's simply not true. You can still do dynamic reconfigurations -- basically, take system boards, and attach and detach them from a running domain at any time. VERY VERY cool.
We're contemplating putting our L700 tape library on its own system board, and scripting a DR detach/attach each night to each domain, so it backs up to a local SCSI device instead of over 622ATM. Very cool indeed.
The E10K is a _very_ impressive piece of hardware. I'm not crazy about the SSP software driving it, but the design is really solid. You can tell it was designed by Cray.