Big Shiny Toys (was: Re: M$ SQueaLServer)
On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 12:42:34AM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote: > Leons links to TPC are ace .. thats amazing .. the best NT powered thing > is at a piss poor 1700 ... presumably NT doesnt scale well to a 128 > processor UltraSparc then ;))) AFAIK, the starfire (Sun Ultra Enterprise 1) only goes up to 64 processors (I used to work on an under equipped one ;-) The SGI challenge does 128 procs, though. I also believe that Unisys do 32 processor NT machines, although I heard a rumour that they had stopped recently. At the level of database you're talking about, although multiple processors is nice, and they do want to be *fast*[1], the real critical issue is going to be disk bandwith. Fibre to the drive, baby! Sorry, but I have no experience of SQL server worth mentioning, just Oracle. Although the starfire had 6Gb of RAM in the place I used to work at, it still ran like treacle. But I'm no DBA, so there's probably a very good reason for it doing this. -Dom (still shuddering at the backups of a poxy 250Gb database) [1] The ultrasparc was still stuck at 400Mhz last I looked... -- | Semantico: creators of major online resources | | URL: http://www.semantico.com/ | | Tel: +44 (1273) 72 | | Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |
Re: Big Shiny Toys (was: Re: M$ SQueaLServer)
Dominic Mitchell [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: *> *>AFAIK, the starfire (Sun Ultra Enterprise 1) only goes up to 64 *>processors (I used to work on an under equipped one ;-) The SGI *>challenge does 128 procs, though. The starfile does, indeed, max out at 16 boards with 4 processors each making 64 processors in total. It also has a cap of 64 GB ram. *>Sorry, but I have no experience of SQL server worth mentioning, just *>Oracle. Although the starfire had 6Gb of RAM in the place I used to *>work at, it still ran like treacle. But I'm no DBA, so there's probably *>a very good reason for it doing this. Yeah, probably someone was a cheap bastard after buying the E10k. One of the major US broadcasting companies used to run their website on a couple of U2s with 512mb ram and a NFS mounted filesystem with Oracle..and let us not forget them using FrontPage for collaborative design. Buying fast hardware is only one part of the solution. If the E10k was slow it was most certainly due to bad system operation desgin and a human who didn't connect the dots and follow the slow I/O. *>[1] The ultrasparc was still stuck at 400Mhz last I looked... Look again. The UltraSparc-III is at 750Mhz and up. e.
