On Thursday 30 June 2005 19:14, Peter Arremann wrote:
> On Thursday 30 June 2005 17:52, Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Dude, compared to modern UltraSPARC III/IV, _yes_ they _are_ slow.
> > But there are a lot of UltraSPARC II options that are still quite
> > viable solutions.
> Yeah - for a boat anchor or a door stop... Other than that, a US-II isn't
> worth the power it would take to run it... That's why you see so many of
> them on ebay now - cause no one wants it anymore :-)
I'll differ on this.
We at PARI are currently running two live servers that are UltraSPARC
II-based, in particular, Ultra30's. The specs: USIIi 248MHz, 384MB RAM,
2x4.2GB UW SCSI drives). Is it a barnburner? No. Its performance beats a
400MHz Pentium II with IDE two to one, though, running the same apps I am
using the Ultra30's for. Very usable machines. More usable than the quad
AlphaServer 2100 I have, that's for sure (the AS2100 we have is configured
with four 275MHz EV45's and a GB of RAM with the DAC960 hardware RAID
controller, and burns 800+ watts). Although proper setup and optimization
might make the AS2100 worthwhile, particularly since I can run CentOS on it!
Still, it takes 800 watts!
My U30's are doing antivirus, antispam, webmail, and regular e-mail services,
running Aurora Linux 1.92 (Fedora Core 2, basically, for SPARC). The
machines are responsive, fairly low load average running, and moderate e-mail
volume being processed. Profiling them, the MailScanner activities use the
most CPU.
The hardware is more reliable than comparable Intel hardware would be
(comparable, again, being a PII 400+ with 256-384MB RAM, an Adaptec 2940UW,
and 8GB Seagate UW drives: I know this because I have benchmarked another of
our servers here that is a dual 400MHz PII with those drives and came up with
comparable numbers (using UnixBench 4.1, which benchmarks quite a few
areas)). Those U30s are built like tanks; they also take approximately the
same amount of power as the dual 400 does; about 100 watts.
Now, if you're going to compare the E4500 to Intel hardware, you need to look
at high-end Proliants and PowerEdges of that time period, not modern Dell
PowerEdges. Hmmm, there weren't any comparable Intel servers in that time
period (with the exception of Sequent's Dynix stuff that ran dozens of 66Hz
486's and cost a mint).
And when you (we) are donated 30 Ultra 30 workstations, you (we) use them.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
