Bah! Kope is showing his ignorance by posting this blather.
Consider Hotmail's web hosting infrastructure - a number of Sun Enterprise systems providing file storage, with a boatload of x86 boxen running the http daemons.
If you were Hotmail's IS manager, and you swapped that around so that you were using $300 consoles for the front-end servers (instead of $2000 servers), politics aside you'd be getting a nice promotion.
Nobody in his right mind deploys a single machine for a mission-critical application - doesn't matter how fast it gets fixed, when it's down your business is down.
The solution is to use a heap of cheap, redundant boxes. (Think RAID, but for servers). Once you're using that model, the type of machine is irrelevant - as long as it's cheap and you can afford to lose a few, you win.
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Bah! Kope is showing his ignorance by posting this blather.
Consider Hotmail's web hosting infrastructure - a number of Sun Enterprise systems providing file storage, with a boatload of x86 boxen running the http daemons.
If you were Hotmail's IS manager, and you swapped that around so that you were using $300 consoles for the front-end servers (instead of $2000 servers), politics aside you'd be getting a nice promotion.
Nobody in his right mind deploys a single machine for a mission-critical application - doesn't matter how fast it gets fixed, when it's down your business is down.
The solution is to use a heap of cheap, redundant boxes. (Think RAID, but for servers). Once you're using that model, the type of machine is irrelevant - as long as it's cheap and you can afford to lose a few, you win.