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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.
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
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?
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 :)
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
Two hours? I'm not surprised...the memory check on 64GB would take fricking forever.
Not to mention running fsck on the disk....
(Mandatory for any hardware thread) Imagine a Beowulf of these.....
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
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.
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
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.