Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 20:59:43 -0700 (MST) From: "Forrest W. Christian" <forrestc@imach.com> To: Jeff Gray <jwgray@netbox.com> Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: co-location model Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0103112027080.10411-100000@workhorse.iMach.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10103111918240.97103-100000@adsl-63-201-55-220.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net>
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Let me address these points, one by one: > real reliability, If what you mean by this is what basically boils down to server uptime and availability, I think you will run into some difficulty in this group selling the fact that a mainframe is essentially more reliable than a well-designed intel platform running FreeBSD. I think that most of us never have downtime other than that caused by planning (hardware upgrades) or environmental (extended power failures, floods, etc.) causes. I sure can't remember the last time a server rebooted without me forcing it to. Every mainframe installation I've been around is definately subject to the same failures as I've described before. > real fault tolerance I think I probably need to have this better defined. I know of ways to do hot failover, high availibility raid, etc. etc. etc. under FreeBSD. is there anything specific that the mainframe provides which isn't what most of us think as the classic definition of fault tolerance. > real hardware efficiency [jail does this] > real security by a well designed mainframe OS management system, I've lumped these two together for one reason: Under freebsd, jail provides you a level of security. Yes, I realize you can get out of a jail. I think we could argue whether most Mainframe Installations isolate their users more or less than jail does. > real scalability of user resources like storage space. An example: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 230-Welcome to ftp.cdrom.com, a service of Digital River, Inc. 230-There are currently 528 users out of 3000 possible. 230- 230-This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5. 230-The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of 230-FreeBSD, please visit http://www.freebsd.org for more information. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Define scalability. The above is scaled up there rather high. 4GB is the most we can go memory-wise right now. This is a restriction due to 32 bit addressing in most programs. FreeBSD could very easily access up to 8TB of memory on a 64bit machine, assuming that the hardware was up to the task. The maximum FILESYSTEM limit under freebsd is about 1TB. The filesystem is actually capable of up to 8 or 16TB but there are some internals which cause this to not be availble without some modifications. > -Is this a reasonable long term model for ISPs and or server farms? I think that this MIGHT be marketable to the right people. I know that there are a lot of management types out there which still love to hear the mainframe story line. I'm not sure how this could be marketable to say, the members of this list. > -Does anyone offer this today at the scale of rack size bites of > physical space? Not aware of any, but who says they don't exist.. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) AC7DE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iMach, Ltd., P.O. Box 5749, Helena, MT 59604 http://www.imach.com Solutions for your high-tech problems. (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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