64-Bit Java For Linux

LWATCDR writes "First we got 64-bit Flash; then the beginnings of 64-bit Wine; now Sun is providing a 64-bit Java plugin. For most people there is nothing to hold you back from running 64-bit Linux."

Comments

64 bit this, 64 bit that...

[girlintraining]

Okay, on one hand, native 64 bit apps are good because they speed up data execution--in theory. On the other hand, is this really "stuff that matters"? This isn't new technology. I read slashdot so I can get news on stuff in the industry that has some kind of impact, not to hear about product feature announcements. In other news, a network admin noticed the linoleum in the corner of the slashdot server room curled slightly today. x_x

Re:Developers section red now ?

[mcrbids]

Nice piece of iron. As a data warehouser myself, I have a few questions:

1) What made you decide to go with one big piece of iron rather than a cluster of lightweight systems?

2) "Data Warehouse" implies semi-static storage, making the 16 cores you mention somewhat overkill. Are you warehousing in a DBMS? (EG: Oracle/DB2/MSSQL)

3) 256 GB of RAM looks like it's maxed out - are you worried about future growth? What are your plans over the next 3 years?

4) What's the growth rate of your data size?

5) What's your expectation of uptime?

6) What's your DR recovery plan? What happens if the building your big-ass server is in is melted into vapor by a nuclear bomb?

In our scenario, we host data for clients, with over a hundred clients, growing by about 25% client base per year. It's part of our application suite, but since the types of data we host is increasing every year, our data growth rate is around 75% growth per year. I've responded by clustering our application, so that each client is hosted in a logically different (redundant) environment that may or may not be shared, controlled by local DNS. We're still small: now at 6 8-core 1U rackmount servers with U320 SCSI, 3.6 TB of storage total today, with physical room for 400% expansion without replacing any servers, average system load around 0.10 during business hours.

One of the key concerns I've had is availability - we're specifically architected so that any single server in our cluster can fail, but cause 5 minutes of downtime, and that our primary hosting can fail completely (EG: mushroom cloud over our hosting facility) with 24 hours recovery to an off-site, off-network host.

Since we're growing rather quickly, I'd be very interested in your responses!