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Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 11:12:55 +0800
From: Erich Dollansky <oceanare@pacific.net.sg>
Organization: oceanare pte ltd
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To: Olaf Hoyer <ohoyer@ohoyer.de>
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cc: Artem Koutchine <matrix@itlegion.ru>
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cc: Lanny Baron <lnb@FreeBSDsystems.COM>
Subject: Re: Multiprocessor system VS one processor system
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Hi,

Olaf Hoyer wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Simon wrote:
> 
> 
>>What exactly is not easily achievable with a modern dual Xeon Intel server
>>with 20 modern SCSI harddrives and proper RAID card? that is on an old
>>E450 Sparc? have you personally done any testing to back this up? surely,
>>the chipset design of Intel boards are not up-to-par with latest Sun servers,
>>but Intel is catching up. There was just never enough demand until now.
> 
> 
> Yes, its an E450 with 4x400MHZ Ultrasparc 2, IIRC with 2 or 4MB 2nd
> level cache, acting as mail server, pumping several millions of emails
> around per day, with 2 million mailboxes to deliver to, being one of
> several mailhosts.
> 
> Thats a region where a i386-based box won't fit easily, also the
> diagnostics regarding flaky RAM or CPU are way better with SUN than with
> most i386-based hardware.
> 

People tend to forget that the CPU clock rate of all Sun boxes is 
pretty low but the I/O bandwith is much higher than the memory 
bandwith of Xeon machine.

Little things like changing a CPU while the machine is up and 
running is not known to PC based servers at all.

A PC based server is good when you have to consider the money but 
will increase the risk of down-time.

Erich