blogs.smugmug.com — After our well-publicized problems with Rackable and our search for a new server vendor, we ended up with Sun and their AMD line. I reviewed the ones we've been using over the last two months, and I gotta say, they're about as close to perfect as I've found. Read on to see the pros & cons.
Apr 12, 2007 View in Crawl 4
braininajarApr 12, 2007
dell's storage is cheaper, and OSX is not the best OS for a server ( mach/XNU is very, very slow... and scales like crap )
mancatApr 12, 2007
I am sorry but nobody is buying Xserves.
beercosoftwareApr 12, 2007
Red Hat 5 or Fedora 6 Linux+<a class="user" href="http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=30">http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=30</a> (or the USA website)=A billion times better buy than any Sun gear. Oh, the DC power, I forgot to mention that. Sun will give you a standard DC power supply and make you BUY the AC.Most data centers do not have direct DC power. Netras are mainly shipped as DC ready.Have fun in the Sun. I'm wearing my Red Hat and staying cool in the shade from here on forward.
mithrandirApr 13, 2007
Oh wow... Tigerdirect ==1,000,000,000x better than Sun gear.Put down the crack pipe, you're making Canadians look bad.
svpirateApr 13, 2007
@beercosoftwareThe phrase 'clueless' comes to mind.@ mithrandir"The x86 world is just starting to come up to the standards and usability of Sun's LOM and ALOM"We have a single 3-year-old Dell Poweredge 1800 Xeon server sat on the network that has very good advanced LOM (Dell RAC card) on a par totally with the stuff that ships on the x2200 (feature for feature infact with those mentioned in the article) , but it cost us extra and sits on a PCI card. I was willing to pay for it however as it makes life real easy. I have to walk 400 yards and through 3 doors to get to it, and it has no monitor hooked up to it (oh and I'm lazy ;o) ). It even uses Java, as if Sun needed telling how good it is for that sort of stuff :o)I simply think Sun kept ALOM out of their initial lines of x86/x64 servers as a cost cutter. The SPARC servers have had it for a good while longer, but they cost more and are aimed wholly at a different market.
svpirateApr 13, 2007
@beercosoftwareFor the love of god give up already...I perennially have this same argument with anti-Apple people. You pay for the design, the time spent making sure it's all *just so*. Unless you exhaustively test 100s of different components to get the best combination of performance and reliability, test many cases to see what is the most efficient cooling design, test lots of PSUs to see which is most reliable and efficient, and so on... you will NEVER land at a home made or even an average-Joe-vendor built machine that comes close to the build quality of Suns servers. Suns x64 servers are competitively priced for the return you get for the money, and the build quality is superb. They even look good.
svpirateApr 13, 2007
Damn, who cancelled my reply... c'mon, own up! Oh nevermind...
svpirateApr 13, 2007
I've been a long time admirer of Sun equipment, but I've never really got any feedback about their modern stuff from actual enterprise customers. It's nice to see someone come out and make clear what is and isn't good, and for the most part it sounds very psoitive, but that much doesn't suprise me, I've been very impressed with the way they are going since Schwartz took the helm.
beercosoftwareApr 13, 2007
@mithrandirI can install any packages I want. That's not the point.Even Telecom does not need these massive cases, and overpriced gear.Laugh all you want at the stuff on Tiger, you can build yourself a way better cluster with that gear and RH or Fedora Linux.Much easier to carry as well.