Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!"
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 :)
Either way, this whole thread has shown two things:
I would be really interested in knowing. Thank you!
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
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
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.
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.
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 claimL. 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 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
We run two E450s filling loaded with 4CPUs (300MHz UltraSparc III in one and 480MHz U3 in the other), 4Gig Ram, 100Gig Plus in in multiple drives arranges as RAID 0+1. And they run very fast indeed
Of course for a single threaded application that runs inside L1 cache, a PIII or Athlon box will beat the SUN. But for with multithread or bandwidth constrained tasks the E450s are worths every penny.
I also really like the design of the casing plastic and ironmorgery of the E450s. Built in cabinet for 20 scsi hot swappable Hard drives. 3 Hot swappable power supply boxes. Everything pops apart easier for hardware mainantance. Lovely box.
The downside for the price you can get ten Athlon 1200 1Gig DDR boxes and still have money left over to rack mount then and buy the rack and cabinet.
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.