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How Many Desktop PCs Can One Server Replace?
NZheretic asks: "HP has just announced that they have upgraded a four-processor server with Advanced Micro Devices' new dual-core Opteron. The amount of processing power a multi-processor multi-core system can deliver seem like a waste of processing power for most traditional servers, which are more likely to suffer from disk access bottlenecks before lack of processing power becomes a problem. But what if that power could be delivered direct to the desktop users? The HP ProLiant DL585 supports eight 64-bit PCI-X I/O Slots (Six 100MHz, two 133MHz). The ATI FireMV(TM) 2400 supports Quad DVI/VGA displays on PCI Express. Assuming that you leave one PCI-X slot for a multiport USB card, thats up to twenty eight displays with USB keyboards,mice and headsets that could theoretically replace twenty eight networked desktop PCs. Using DVI and USB extenders, not all of the user stations would have to be within the 7.5 meter cable distance imposed by the DVI cable limit. The only OS currently capable of supporting this many displays is Linux. What limits would be imposed by the hardware and PCI-X bottlenecks? Taking into account the added cost of the HP and ATI hardware, could it deliver a great reduction in the total cost of ownership over both traditional PCs and thin client systems? How many desktops is it practical for a high end server to directly replace?"
Take that giant server and put it in a back room under lock and key. The only things that should plug into it are a single power cable and network. Put a single KVM in your rack to access all the servers in it.
Now buy 30 thin clients. Each one gets a KVM and a network card. Good. Now plug in the power on all the thin clients and plug their network cables into a switch. To remove clutter if you want you can use 802.11 and all the thin clients will only need power.
Ta-da! Welcome to intelligence.
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Actually, it might be cheaper than buying 10 computers. Depends on the actual prices.
For a regular setup, assume a 3-year upgrade cycle and a $1200 computer (not unreasonable).
As long as you can do it for under $12k, you're going to come out ahead. I don't know enough about the equipment to price it all out, but I don't think it sounds that unreasonable.
Wow, lots of factual mistakes. PCI-X != PCI Express. PCI is a bus, PCI-X is a faster version of that bus. PCI-Express is next-gen AGP. I don't know of many PCI-X video cards. As for input, seperate devices are marked seprately in the kernel, if you just use /dev/input it conglomerates all the inputs. You still need a decent Xserver/servers to handle all the seperate sessions, though.
And since X is monolithic, you'll need to run seperate X threads per display, or one idiot going to a website with a thousand animated .gifs will stop everyone.
In short: Bad Idea.
Why not new equipment? I recently purchased a brand new thin client (rdesktop, xterm) for $150. It includes keyboard and mouse and NO moving parts. I figure the useful life will be in the 7-10 year range. Connect that to a Linux server using X or a Windows box with Terminal circus.
It gives the same end result without messing with exotic hardware and configurations, and you only have to be as close as your nearest ethernet port.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
However, for supporting a 100 desktops, something as robust as the V490 might be a good thing.
Exactly. Why some people on here suggest using commodity parts to support a hundred users is beyond me. Perhaps they've never been in a business where if 100 people aren't working for 5 minutes they've just loss thousands of dollars of productivity.
It sounds like for $50k server + $30k clients = $80k you can get a robust system from sun. Throw in another $20k a year in maintaince and its only $100k for the first year, $20k a year after.
Factor that against the time of an "elite" sys admin that wants to do it all by himself, costing the company 2 months in his time, and when it fails as he's the only one that can fix it by researching on usenet, people will soon see that Sun is a bargain.
Well, not exactly wrong, but Matrox has a 64 Bit 66MHz PCI card to which PCI-X is very compatible (and it's 4 times as fast as standard PCI): Here It's not PCI-X, but it's pretty close.
Never mind running multiple users off it, I want one for a dedicated flight simulator.