John S. Giltner, Jr. wrote:
[...]
I can matter matter, 100 PC's need at least 100 network connections
and 100 connections to the SAN.
[...]
Again, you compare port numbers, not dollars. Single LAN card costs
about 5$ (reatil price PCI 32-bit, Eth 100BaseT). Probably veeery good
3Com LAN card costs approx. 100$. Two-port OSA Express costs approx.
20000$. That means you can buy 200 PC cards instead.
Actually I was not even including the cost of the LAN card as most
servers come with two Gigabit Ethernet Adapters already. I was talking
about the 200 Gigabit switch ports. If you have something like a Cicso
6500, you are talking aoubut USD15,000 per 16 ports. A fully loaded
6513 can only handle 176 Gigabit ports, a 6509 only 112. So you are
talking two 6500's which with all approprate hardware would run over USD
200,000.
You're right, LAN card (and usually SAN card as well) are included in PC
server price. I forgot about it.
You're wrong with assumption for 200 GbE ports. You don't need it.
Assuming that Linuxes on VM share one (or two) OSA GbE port, the
bandwith per server can be less. So it's enough to buy FE switches,
maybe with one GbE port. There are plenty of cost-effective solutions,
not necessarily "No-name Ltd. Made in P.R.C."
FC card is more expensive: approx. 1000$. It's still much less than
FICON cards (FICON card price is AFAIK comparable to OSA).
I don't know VM and Linux under VM - do they really share FICON ports?
Linux under z/VM do share FICON ports. In fact, I will have to verify
this, we are sharing are FICON ports between z/OS and z/VM.
What about FCP ? Mid-range DASD is much cheaper, pretty well scalable,
also offers FlashCopy-like and PRRC features.
How many people do you have to support your distributed boxes? We have
4 for about 40 servers and they complain they are over worked.
6-7. Again, it absolutely doesn't depend on number of machines. For
example, when they established clusters instead of single servers or
addded servers to "multi-server" solution, they noticed *less* duties.
They still need to maintain user accounts, restore accidentally deleted
user files, e-mail boxes, web pages changes etc. etc.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
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