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 ;)

Comments

Another destined failure?

[GreyPoopon]

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?

Re:Another destined failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably are being too harsh. IBM Mainframes have MTBFs in the 50-year range. That's reliable.

An IBM mainframe will "call home" and order a replacement part as soon as it detects fluctuations in performance indicative of imminent failure.

When the CPUs are running, they're each really two CPUs - at a per-instruction level on the silicon itself, if the results from both CPUs
differ, the CPU is "retired".

There's similar failsafes and interlocks all through the system.

And the I/O throughput is both phenomenal, and transactional.

The PC has a MTBF of a few years, often much less. Thus, while you might get equivalent computing power, once you get up to a few hundred PCs, you spend as much time running around "changing lightbulbs" - i.e. replacing PCs that have failed, as doing useful work.

The PC hardware architecture is a "toy" compared to a mainframe, or even a commercial unix box, or (ironically, given the amiga's "toy" image) even an old amiga motherboard.

redhat high availability server?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

We're heading back to the '80s

[sticks_us]

Here's why:

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-streamin g-multimedia stuff. (I'm not bitter-I'm jealous)

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?

progress ;)

[^Z]

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.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Ami Ganguli]

Actually it's more like a really dense server farm.

Possible markets? The only thing that really comes to mind for me is ISPs. This could replace racks of essentially standalone machines quite nicely. But of course that's not the best market to go after right now.

I'm wondering if more conventional companies would go for this. There are lots of companies that have a ridiculous number of little servers floating around. If they had been deployed on a beast like this from the start then they could have saved a lot of money. But now that they have all these little servers, it's hard to imagine them throwing them all out and replacing them with one box.

Enterprise credibility

[TheLoneCabbage]

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!!)

TCO

[onion2k]

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.

Re:s/390 not cheap? REALLY.

[Wesley Felter]

How much horsepower does each of those virtual servers get? It can't be that much. $500/server would be too much if it was only 100 MIPS.