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SGI Linux Servers Coming
Found in the files of LinuxToday: Computer
Reseller News has an article about SGI being in talks with Linux vendors, hoping
to reach an agreement with one, presumably so they can ship it on their upcoming
server line. The new servers will be for the telco and ISP markets.
As was previously suspected, the company says it will "contribute components" of its
technology to the open source community, including OpenGL. Maybe XFS will
be in there, too. I've heard it's quite nice...
We don't use OpenGL apps but we rely heavily on SGI for file servers (up to 1.3 TB).
For us to migrate to Linux based SGI boxen we would need the following IRIX features (or equivalent):
IRIX XFS (not the X font Server). Or at least a better non-beta 64 bit journaled file system. We often exceed Linux's max file size.....
IRIX XLV Rock Solid Mirroring, stripping and concatention of hard drives that makes the linux equivalent look like a grad school project. Unfortunately XLV does not do software RAID, and since SGI charges $2,000 to enable the mirroring option, I doubt they will be giving this away soon.
SGI OpenVault This is not really open, but is a slick API for talking to tape libraries.
CRAY DMF Cray Data Migration facility. This is complicated (but slick) software that works with "open"vault to make a tape library look like a bigbut hard drive to the user and all applications. So far we have not found anything similar on Linux.
NFS compatability with IRIX NFS. For some reason (in my experience) SGI-TO-SGI NFS is way-faster than SGI-Linux.
Ability to run SGI/Irix applications (how fast would a R10000 emulator run on a PIII 500?).
The last item will never happen (except for nostalgia in a decade or two) but if LInux had a stable 64bit file system, rock solid mirror/stiping, solid NFS3 (w. locking), and software to interface with tape libraries, perhaps it could actually start competing with the big guys in the file server arena........
NFS compatability with IRIX NFS. For some reason (in my experience) SGI-TO-SGI NFS is way-faster than SGI-Linux.
This may be a "feature" of your PC's bus and ethernet card. Basically the SGI box can send packets to your PC faster than it can generate interrupts to handle them, overrunning the card. There is a section on this in the FreeBSD FAQ and Handbook
I read the internet for the articles.
Are you sure your media is still good? I've done many many xfsdumps and xfsrestores without a problem. Plus it is SO much faster than tar.
I read the internet for the articles.
SGI's servers (AFAIK) use CPUs from MIPS (which SGI owns). They range in number from 1 to a bunch (at SuperComputing '93, I saw a PowerCHALLENGE box with 144 CPUs).
If they port XFS, that will be REALLY, REALLY cool. XFS has all kinds of neato stuff like journaling (for super-fast fscks) and they also have this thing called GRIO (Guaranteed Rate I/O) where you can allocate a channel to a filesystem that's guaranteed to produce N MB/s... really nice for streaming apps. If SGI can make the transition to Linux across teh board, think of how many resources they could allocate to supporting Linux instead of IRIX... Mmmmm...
-nate
Seeing this gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling. SGI puts out some kick ass boxes in the first place. Coupled with Linux there's nothing you couldn't do with those things. You could be running your web server and kicking someone's ass in quake while compiling your new program while cooking breakfast. Sounds nice:)
Madhatter --It's no wonderland out there.