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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
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
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
- 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...
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.