Well, for development, in terms of how fast you want to compile your code, I
would go with the fastest PC you can afford. However, I have a PIII650 with
256MB RAM, and 9GB HD that is more than fast enough for development
purposes. Unless you plan on playing games, you can probably get a $700
workstation made with oem/generic parts that works fine for development (not
including monitor). I would spend the most money on a big monitor, or a nice
19" flat-screen. Go for flat if you can..its easier on the eyes and takes
little room, but at 3x+ the cost of a good 19" monitor, I don't think its
quite worth it yet.
As for deployment, well..that depends too. You can go as little as a P133Mhz
(if you could find one) with linux, running a 100% java app server (like
orion)..although it will probably be pretty slow. Because Orion is 100%
Java, you can run it on any JDK 1.2+ platform, probably with little problems
on all of them. I think the best deal, being that Orion is clusterable, is
to use cheap Athlon or Intel based servers. You can spend $10K on a dual
900Mhz Dell server, or you can build a nice 1.1Ghz Athlon farm (say 3
servers per island, 2 islands) for as little as $1200 each. Since they are
servers, opt for 4MB or 8MB video card, Win2K OS, JDK 1.3, and Orion. That
is all we have on our server. We did put Diskkeeper, and have Terminal
Services installed (with win2K Server), which allows us full administration
of the server from anywhere. Figure $700 or so for Win2K, $1200 for the
Athlon server (although I would wait a few more months to use the Athlon SMP
servers coming out soon..where you can put dual athlons and they are more
inline with Intel servers), $1500 for Orion, and a few hundred for other
software (give or take). Each deployable server would cost under $5000 and
you would have pretty darn good performance. Ofcourse, you can go with a
Dell server and WebLogic..that would run you about $250K for the same setup
that will cost you $30K with Orion (being that WebLogic is only 10x more
expensive).
I would also say it depends on your application. If that new Mac 8" cube had
a dual processor in it, I would choose to run that! At $1700 for a computer
that does 3GFLOPS of calculations, it beats the Intel and Athlon hands down
in calculations..which is good for intensive math use. Thus, if you were
building say an imaging farm that had to turn html into faxes (pdf, rtf,
etc), I would opt for faster math capable cpus. Ofcourse..if I had my
choice, I would really choose the Alpha cpu..that is what the Athlon is
based on too.
But, SUN offers a pretty good setup too, for a lot more money (usually).
Honestly, if you want a setup that can probably handle several 1000 users at
one time I would set up an Orion farm using Athlon or Intel 1Ghz+ servers,
do two islands, each with 3 servers for fail-over and load-balancing (so you
can handle more people). Do the same type of setup for the EJB
servers..perhaps using dual cpu servers. Being that Orion costs nothing
extra for dual/quad cpus, its ok to go that route. You can even buy a dual
board with only 1 cpu and add a second cpu later (but don't wait more than 1
year..you wont be able to get that cpu if you wait that long..it will be
obsolete).
Hope that provides some insight.
> I would be very gratefull if anyone with experience tell me what
> it's the appropiate hardware to develope ejbs, servlets and
> jsps, and what
> it's the appropiate in order to run an app with a great load
> of concurrent
> users.
>
> I wanna know your opinion about what to choose
> Unix(solaris,HP,..) or Win
> (intel) for both development and real app.
>
> TIA.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> David Sierra Fern ndez
> --------------------------------------------------------------
>
> -- Sierr@ --
>
