What Do You Look For in a Big Iron Review?

ValourX writes "We're starting to write more reviews of enterprise-class hardware and software and although we've done pretty well with our reviews, the high-end products are a lot trickier when it comes to testing and evaluation. Obviously it is not possible to build an enterprise-grade 'your neck is on the line' production environment just for writing reviews, but maybe we can do something smaller, just for testing purposes. What do you as an IT professional want to read in a review for a server OS or a high-speed switch, or a big iron server or proprietary workstation? What tests should we run? What results and feature comparisons are going to be most meaningful to you?"

Comments

Not Speed

[jellomizer]

Well the 2 main issues with Big Iron Equipment is How Well it handles Load and Scalability. For Load They should max out the system slightly above the recommended specs and see how well it handles it. Most people don't care for overall benchmark but more issues that affect the user. Say it was a WebServer We don't care how many pages/second it can handle but how well we get the webpages when the system is maxed out. Do we have to wait 5 minutes and the page just pops in. Or do we wait 5 Minutes for a page to load but we see the results of it coming in. When working above the required load how much does the system heat up (causing possible failures in the future). Secondly is how well can it scale, Can Extra Processors be added on, Can you add/hotswap processors on the system. What is the Max Ram it can hold can you add more is there room to add more. How compatible is it with competitors stuff (Say an IBM Server with a Sun Storage Array) how well do they follow the standards so you are able to use the server even if the company who produced it died.

Speed (which a lot of people put there Big Irons to the test) is really not that important of a detail. A PC with a 3 Ghz Processor will out perform a Sun Fire15k with multiple processors, for any single task. But when it starts handling load the Sun Fire will handle it better then the PC. When companies decide to buy the Big Iron they want it to be an investment that can last them at least 3-4 years preferably 4-10 years. And all they need to do is add stuff to it so that it scales with the time.