Slashdot Mirror
A Quarter-Million Dollar Box For A Free OS
popeyethesailor writes: "According to a CNET story, the server startup Egenera will be debut its high end Linux servers for financial services customers, running Red Hat Linux.
An earlier CNETstory details their design." That's a hefty pricetag, but the companies they hope to sell to ("market--financial-services companies and service providers") aren't shy about investing in tools. Of course, an S/390 isn't cheap either, no matter how many GNU/Linux images it's running ;)
It's... a mainframe.
Unix returns to its home.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all these servers going to run with 4GB of RAM? What good will they do running Linux when Linux can't currently scale past 4GB of RAM?
void women (int money, time_t time);
With 96 Xeons in it?
...and they're lazy enough to just go and run RedHat on it?
When this fucks up its not going to look good for the linux community.
And yes this post is probably going to get me the most troll ratings I've ever had, but I had to say it.
How can they be naive enough to have such a poerful machine and run a _desktop_ targeted distribution on it?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Could somebody please explain to me where the $250,000 value is? Is this just another case of bad allocation of venture capital? The $250,000 is the BASE price of a system that can hold up to 24 cpu boards that CAN be connected to a network or CAN be connected to a drive array. The stated purpose in the article is to provide redundancy for failover. The only cool thing I can see is that if a cpu fails, another cpu will assume its name, characteristics and storage space. What wasn't clear was whether or not all 24 CPU boards were redundant, or whether you could have several redundant machines within the same "cabinet." But there wasn't anything really magical going on here. These boards would contain either 2 or 4 high-end processors (just over 1 GHz). I can see a price tag of maybe $40,000 or something, but certainly nowhere near the order they are asking. Anybody have any insight on this?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Looks like they bought a copy of the Redhat High Availability server for about $2000 and loaded it into a rack of CPU's.
Pretty much any competant tech could do it. I've had customers running systems like this for Geophysical 3D Migrations for over a year now. No big deal really.
It sure took me forever to find a "product" in their website. Mostly just organisational and marketing bullshit.
Here's why:
n g-multimedia stuff. (I'm not bitter-I'm jealous)
1. The dot-com boom has pretty much evaporated, leaving the realm of "professional computer work" to geeky types with college degrees and bad hair (I'm one of them). The work that is done is now more mundane and laborious(billing, insurance, reporting, etc) than $20K-bonus-scooter-riding-dot-com-hipster-streami
2. Computers are now getting bigger and more mainframe-y (See comment above). More and more enterprises are centralizing mission-critical functions, primarily for ease of management as well as power and security. Proof:. We've already got Linux/390, the Solaris E10K, there's some newbigandexciting Intel box out there I keep hearing about that has 64-way SMP and now this.
Anyone have the newest Creative Computing?
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
What we have seen 10 yrs ago? Last-generation hardware being used for servers. Now we see newer and better software running on older hardware designs (e. g. S/390). Do the math. Next generation of even more powerful software will run on even older (yet refurbished) hardware designs: expect Linux 4.x run on 8192 processor UNIVAC, with 5.0 kernel for 50GHz ENIAC in the works.
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
Sounds like 5 years ago. I remember like it was yesterday.
Running 1000 user Netware 3.x on a Netframe 450. (I especially remember the $5000/1GB drives)
This "new" architecture sounds a lot like a repackage of that idea. They have multiple server blades in 1 chassis with a proprietary (800Mhz) backplane to communicate. They could even run Netware/OS2 and NT in the same chassis.
This new one even has the "Rcon" (lights out) capability (hee hee).
This is a verry good trend when you stop to think about it.
One of the key issue technical column writers have been b!tching about is that Linux lacks enterprise server credibility.
With Linux driving mainframes and massive Credit Card / insurance company type machines who could complain about Linux's capabilities to handle their buisness demands. (if it can balance the budget for a fortune 500, it can host your stupid ASP/Intranet/fileserver/DB)
Think about the (Ugh! I'm gonna be sick) marketing angle... the average small buisness, or even home user, can have access to the same toys as multi-billion dollar corporations and goverments. (barring the obvious memmory and other hardware limits, this is about perception after all)
And it's not about a free OS. It's about the ability to develop the app on a PC and recompile it to run on a computer that makes Deep Thought look like Rain Man. And on top of all that the big system will work just like any other linux box running X. So it's easy to administer (wow! Who would have thought to say that about Linux!!)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
This just goes to show that the total cost of ownership for Linux/Unix/NT/2k has very little to do with the license for the OS at all. Hardware, admin, the software running on the box and so on more than make up the the trivial price differences between most server operating systems. Just because a Linux CD might be free doesn't mean running it on an enterprise box is going to save you a single penny.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
This must be what microsoft is talking about when they say that Linux has a high total cost of ownership ;)
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Check out www.rlxtechnologies.com. They have had the same technology available for almost a year now. The 'blade plane' for reducing the number of cables needed... etc... etc... And you can get three blades in a 3U case for $5k.
well then I better get into the hardware business.
Nice to see the old "BSDLicense/Windows" naming convention creeping in there.
Can we not drop this? For those who haven't realised yet, the fad is over.
Obiously, this machine is worth more than I am :)
Software should be free and hardware should be $250,000, right? Does that mean I should be a hardware engineer not a software engineer?
The labor component of TCO (the biggest) is inversely proportional to the population of people who know about and can support the system. As more and more programmers/sysadmin get "on board" with Linux, TCO goes down.
This is also called "lock-in", the primary value of a software product is not intrinsic, it's how many people know about and use your system. It works very much like rock music... the more well known it is, the more popular it becomes (even if it is god awful). Of course, in software it's double powerful beacuse people familar with the software make other software that is dependent on the base software, thus creating a multiplier to this effect which is so very powerful.
NT and Office have a "low" TCO, since one can *hire* people off the streets to administer and use these products without additional raining. Hopefully Linux will be the TCO leader by saturating the sysadmin market from the bottom up. If sysadmins perfer Linux over NT, then Linux will eventually have the lower labor component of the TCO.
isn't that what IBM always wanted, "making money off the hardware"
If indeed NT has a lower TCO than Linux, it is only a short-term item. For every person that learns how to use $500 NT advanced server there are two who can't afford the $500 and learn $0 Linux instead. Eventually this change-in-mindshare will catch up with Microsoft and the TCO table will shift; with Microsoft on the higher end... since those who know Microsoft NT Advanced Server will be in shorter supply.
So... Microsoft may be right about their price in the short term; the market is quite inelastic. But in the long term the market is quite elastic... and it certainly notices the value proposition Linux provides.
i bet once they realize how inferior linux is to any real os they will dump the servers.
- A number of front-end or presentation servers, often web-based
- A set of middleware/application servers
- A number of back-end servers, normally running a database of some sort
In addition you might see a load balancer in there as well for more complex systems. This box allows you to put all of these things in a single physical unit, with a nice high speed interconnection between them, along with the ability to add servers as required.A single server with many CPUs like the Sun E10K is great but very complex and really expensive. It doesn't give you the freedom to separate out components. That's why people moved away from monolithic boxes and on to the distributed model. This machine is trying to combine the best of both worlds, with modularity of servers but a much better sense of locality for a single application spread across multiple systems.
Sharing interfaces to the real world makes sense, too, as most of the traffic can stay internal. Think of the cost of $2-3K per fibre channel interface and $1k per GigE interface, not to mention the relevant switches, and suddenly this box doesn't seem to be too expensive after all.
I imagine that this will ultimately stand or fall on the TCO, the biggest part of which is bound to be management...
Servers are like Rolls Royces... they cost a bundle but are as reliable as hell.
Like Rolls Royces, servers tend to stay away from bleeding edge technology, instead focusing on tried and tested stuff built with only the best components and only the best craftsmen.
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
The only time price matters is when you are talking about recouping your investment. I have worked with a few financial companies, and if this thing can give them a bit better performance, than the cost will be made up in days or weeks.
I look at this product as akin to Windows 2000 datacenter, a product which costs at least 500k on a 32 way system (from Compaq).
This is the time to look at a product like this and say "Wow, if they can sell it to companies who have traditionally run mainframes, MVS, VMS or some "Big" unix, than it is good for Linux"
-Jeff
It's a cluster, not a server. It's hard to tell how this is that different from a rack full of 1U servers, but I didn't read their Web site carefully.
The actual benchmark machine for 'Charlie' was a rather low end machine, probably 1 million total cost. With 40,000 images that's 25 bucks a server. Let's say that in practice that's off by a factor of 20. That's right let's say the benchmark understates the actual cost by 95%. That ends up $500 bucks a server. Still too much?
Sun and IBM are gonna do anything for a sale. When business gets slow is when these firms really get nasty. The pie (IT budgets) is shrinking fast and most firms plan to continue to reduce spending.
A few years ago when there was plenty to around they probably could have carved a niche. Now, no way.
I give them less than two years.
A message from our sponsor
Linux is a toy, financial service companies are serious about their computers. They should put BSD on these things instead.
can make a significant difference in TCO. In medium sized company with in-house IT staff, the difference could allow you to hire a junior admin.
That's the only way most corporations will ever accept the use of (Free || Open Source) Software. I work as an IT consultant to @BIG_OIL_COMPANIES, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get them to accept things like perl. Hell, I think the only reason they did eventually let us use perl is because ActiveState is around so an actual company is out there that we can point to. Sad? yes. But that's the way it is out in the trenches.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
At (workplace - 2) I was the PFY at a place that used a horde of PCs in a compute cluster. Horde as in north of 150. Probably half of our time was spent simply running around fixing dead or dying machines. I think we had an average of one total machine failure a week, with lots of lesser events
thrown in to make life interesting. The most common failure mode was just a power supply crapping out (not unsuprising becuase these guys were running at 90+% system load 24x7x365).
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Vern Brownell was CTO at GS. He's CEO, not CTO, at Egenera.
I've always believed that supportability was one of the most important "-ilities" when evaluating hardware and software (i.e. scalability, reliability, supportability, etc.). I would have great concerns that the company who manufactured my $250K refrigerator wouldn't be around in a couple of years to support it.
While it is exciting to see new Linux-based platforms emerge, I know that I would have a very difficult time getting my CEO to cough up $250K for this box. Even the technically un-savvy would have to ask "What about solutions from IBM or Sun?".
We've already seen several examples of high-end boxes that have the capabilities to run Linux from more established manufactures. We're familiar with the S/390 and the Sun E10K. There are also lesser-known high-end solutions from other behemoths like Unisys. It may be unfair because Engenra's technology may be far superior to any of the others (but I couldn't even make a premature judgment...their website doesn't give too much detail).
But there's one thing I do know: spending $250K on mission-critical hardware from an unknown startup is a tough pill to swallow for the people who sign the checks. (Remember back in the late 90s when companies used to do things like that - we used to call it venture capital ;)
Don't confuse a large number of 'logical' machines with physical ones. If a Pentium III had the ability in hardware to subdivide itself into thousands of functionally identical logical processors you would be able to run thousands of Linux instances on that one CPU. You probably see the problem that you would immediately encounter: each Linux instance would have only a tiny fraction of a percent of the PIII's processing power. Yes, you'll have thousands of distinct running instances of Linux, but they will be very slow when several of them tries to do something cpu-intensive at the same time.
A mainframe CPU is not dramatically faster than (any other) microprocessor anymore. In recent years I've only been able to indirectly compare the benchmarks; it seems that IBM isn't interested in submitting it's mainframes for industry standard benchmarking these days. Bottom line: a 12-CPU mainframe is still a 12-CPU box, even if running 1,000 or 10,000 instances of Linux.
The mainframe's value is no longer in being a honker of a computer. Reliability, the ability to run existing OLTP workloads, and manageability are the big reasons people still buy mainframes.
Move along now; there's no magic going on here.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
The problem is that many tech people don't get business (but feel like they can bitch about it), and you've just demonstrated that. Business, especially finance, is about relationships. These "guys" have received funding from the financial industry, to build a product for the financial industry, which will be used by the funding parties (including CSFB and Goldman Sachs). If this product works to their satisfaction, nobody will be toast.
But if the part that the computer thought was defective turns out to be O.K. will it go on a murderous rampage?
The Linux kernel documentation states that you could use 16gigs, or more, by using high memory, of course, you can only access 1gb at a time, but that's all done at the kernel level, so unless it's being used for something like dma, it won't really matter.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Score 3 (Funny)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I think that Linux is the best. I hope that everyone uses Linux. It is the best.
Even though the system in question was not a mainframe (intel based blade plane type system), I do want to say a few things about S/390...or whatever IBM is calling them now. Everyone thinks when MS or Linux adds support for a new fangled thing (say the new buses on the PC that are supposed to be mainframe channel like....), well, the mainframe has been doing it for years! When the PC folk added virtual ram via paging stuff out to disk, that came first on the mainframe. Almost every type of PC technology that comes down the pike has it's roots in the mainframe world. PC's need better I/O buses....in comes channels and so on and so on. Our mainframe support consultant that I work with used to call PC's pretend computers because they didn't have half of what the manframe did. Now servers are starting to get these I/O things and we are supposed to gasp because it's new. Well, it isn't new and it's been around for 15 years on the mainframe. Mainframes are solid so long as your network stays up and you don't have students hammering on the thing! :)
Gorkman
flamebait--
what the fuck is this? (note this says fuck not fsck. This poster knows his shit--ed) Timothy sells out and this post is marked as flamebait. Why isn't Timothy's editorial marked as flamebait?
I've a Masters in Finance, in addition to Undergraduate Math / Computer Science.
IBM and Sun already have extensive relationships with Investment Banks - they very market these guys are just trying to enter.
And, as I previously pointed out, will do anything to protect it. I've dealt with both firms, and they will cut almost any kind of deal - in a good market.
Every firm on Wall Street and in The City in London is simplifying tech, cutting back on the number of vendors and relationships.
In this market, its a really bad time to be a tech startup, and especially one that is selling a commodity product.
A message from our sponsor
This thing has got nothing on my cluster of 3 12MB 486DX266's hooked up with fat 10Mbps ethernet to a screaming 16MB P-75 controller running Slackware with IPVS kernel patches and giant 800MB IDE disk.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Nor does it have ESCON adapters or OSA's or virtual routers or WLS or RACF all of which if they were functionally implemented on PC would tend to eat it alive. The point is that while the CEC itself maynot execute more 'ticks' than a Pentium the system architecture is designed to provide efficient performance.
That's why I started programming in Linux!
Well, it sounded good, anyway. I think you get the idea.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
if they're gonna spend so much on the hardware, why don't they buy a decent expensive OS? I mean, more expensive must mean better right? (anon for a reason)