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Hey all

I"m looking into an intresting offer by SUn (that I posted about earlier), and they have the option of going with either SPARC or AMD/Intel. Now with their SPARC system their coolthreads tech is always good (hey energy savings are always good), but with the AMD /Intel tech I"m not piegonholed into one OS as I'd be with SPARC (ro so it seems....I know that BSD doesn't seem to support the latest SPARC chips)

SO for folks that have been able to get their hands on some, is there a superior choice? I'd be using it for server based tasks such as email, development, DNS/DHCP, web, and DB's if that helps.

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 11:11 am Post subject:

No-one's ever tried this out at all?

creed wrote:
Hey all

I"m looking into an intresting offer by SUn (that I posted about earlier), and they have the option of going with either SPARC or AMD/Intel. Now with their SPARC system their coolthreads tech is always good (hey energy savings are always good), but with the AMD /Intel tech I"m not piegonholed into one OS as I'd be with SPARC (ro so it seems....I know that BSD doesn't seem to support the latest SPARC chips)

SO for folks that have been able to get their hands on some, is there a superior choice? I'd be using it for server based tasks such as email, development, DNS/DHCP, web, and DB's if that helps.

those are the old sparcs and have less power than the ones not yet out. The AMD's they offer are pretty good.

Sparcs don't make sense unless you go midrange.

EdisonRex wrote:
creed wrote:
Hey all

I"m looking into an intresting offer by SUn (that I posted about earlier), and they have the option of going with either SPARC or AMD/Intel. Now with their SPARC system their coolthreads tech is always good (hey energy savings are always good), but with the AMD /Intel tech I"m not piegonholed into one OS as I'd be with SPARC (ro so it seems....I know that BSD doesn't seem to support the latest SPARC chips)

SO for folks that have been able to get their hands on some, is there a superior choice? I'd be using it for server based tasks such as email, development, DNS/DHCP, web, and DB's if that helps.

those are the old sparcs and have less power than the ones not yet out. The AMD's they offer are pretty good.

Sparcs don't make sense unless you go midrange.

Ahh ok. That defiantely knocks me out of the running then

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 2:14 pm Post subject:

spoke briefly with our production sysadmins... as they are the solaris side of the house.

Primarily, they are sparc based, mostly for oracle dB services, along with middleware, and they scale very well in this application. This is a multi-terabyte database for mobile phone manufacturing, including configuration management (Agile), Product Lifecycle Management, Service Operations, etc... this runs on a couple of huge Sun E20K series servers, along with a monster storage subsystem.

They are evaluating the Sun opteron boxes for mail and web services, as they feel this is a better bang for the buck. Presently, three older Ultra60's are serving POP3/SMTP email, and a couple of Ultra1's are serving our intranet WWW services with Netscape server (old stuff). They have recently added one dual CPU X4200 Sunfire for testing, moving from qpopper/sendmail to CyrusIMAP and Qmail, and have moved about 50 user accounts onto it, and the box has done pretty well so far... they'll probably consolidate the other three U60's in the near future.

So... It pretty much depends on the application - if heavily threaded (databases for example), another would be Java, then the new Sparcs perform pretty well. If more process/task oriented, the AMD's seem to be pretty good at that.

Off hand comment - why would you want to run BSD on a sun box anyways? To me, just doesn't make sense, as Solaris is much better (not banging against BSD, just that if you're investing in Sun HW...)

iceman

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 2:52 pm Post subject:

Solaris is begat from BSD. You'll find a lot of heritage there.

I do agree you should run Solaris on Sun boxes. Otherwise it's kind of like trying to run Linux on a Mac. You can do it, but it's disappointing. Wink

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 3:15 pm Post subject:

EdisonRex wrote:
Solaris is begat from BSD. You'll find a lot of heritage there.

I do agree you should run Solaris on Sun boxes. Otherwise it's kind of like trying to run Linux on a Mac. You can do it, but it's disappointing.

Yes and no... it was very much like BSD in the early years, but once Sun went crazy and started making it more like SysVR4... any similarity to BSD pretty much went away...

Here's a nice little timeline... solaris 1 was BSD, but Solaris 2 was much more like SVR4...

http://ozguru.mu.nu/archives/2005/11/techtip_sunos_v.html

Interesting note - just logged into one of our Solaris units, a U60, and uptime as of 4:08PM today is 509 days, this is a solaris 8 box, another solaris 6 machine (a Ultra1), uptime is 623 days... wow...

iceman