[osol-help] Considering buying E10K...
Hi all, As a non-Sun expert, I am considering buying an E10K as a file server for a business. It would come with a StorEdge with 12 x 73GB drives. Could anyone please advise how difficult it would be to install openSolaris, and what the major differences would be in running between openSolaris and my current centOS Xeon system. Regards, Matthew Doughty [b]Vesuro Networks Ltd[/b] This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-help] Considering buying E10K...
Hi Matthew, On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 03:16 -0800, Matthew Doughty wrote: As a non-Sun expert, I am considering buying an E10K as a file server for a business. The E10K was a very (very) large machine that's actually now quite outdated now (it was originally sold with up to 64 400mhz processors! - modern processors are a lot faster than these) http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/e1/ It would come with a StorEdge with 12 x 73GB drives. This would be a good storage array though - you'd need to find out what sort of connection it uses, probably scsi or fc-al. For less than the cost of the hosting/electrical setup of the E10K (the E10k is very large, and requires a particular type of power input and cooling) you could probably buy a much more modern, low-end server that would probably fit your needs quite nicely. Something like: http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x2100/ and put a scsi card in it which would talk to your StorEdge array http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x2100/storage.jsp Could anyone please advise how difficult it would be to install openSolaris, and what the major differences would be in running between openSolaris and my current centOS Xeon system. You'd probably want to install Solaris S10U4 on this machine, or you could try Solaris Express (a development version of Solaris that includes source code from OpenSolaris) OpenSolaris is a different operating system than CentOS (which is based on Linux), but if you're familiar with CentOS, moving to Solaris isn't too complex. Installation on supported hardware should be trouble free. cheers, tim -- Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Solaris Engineering Ops http://blogs.sun.com/timf ___ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-help] Considering buying E10K...
Hi, For fileserver a E10k system? How much I/O do you need? Most likely what I would advice, it would be a system capable of dealing with I/O. V490 or V890. The new ones M4000/M5000 I don't have enought experience about those. Well ... if you use a fileserver that uses lots of threads I would advice T5120, it's cpu is Niagara 2 that has 8 cores witch each core has 8 threads giving a total of 64 processes/threds (the same as E10K). The speed is Higher 1.4 Ghz per core. The downside is that you won't have lots of pci for the connection with the storage. Either way, in that case I T5220 can solve the pci problem. Either way, usually what I see and the system that has most PCI for high I/O is V890. Regards Ether.PT This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-help] Considering buying E10K...
E10K : requires as I remember it from 10 years ago 3 x 32 amps 220 volts For the money the Electrical power + the Cooling cost will amount to in a while. You can buy almost anything else . Also you need4 by 4 meters in floor space and a pprreettyy wide door to get it inside you building. The unit is like 3 racks wide. And today there is a 2 rack unit server , the T5220 that does the same job as the E10k did for about 1/40 of the cost. //Lars This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-help] Considering buying E10K...
E10K : requires as I remember it from 10 years ago 3 x 32 amps 220 volts For the money the Electrical power + the Cooling cost will amount to in a while. You can buy almost anything else . Also you need4 by 4 meters in floor space and a pprreettyy wide door to get it inside you building. The unit is like 3 racks wide. And today there is a 2 rack unit server , the T5220 that does the same job as the E10k did for about 1/40 of the cost. I put the first E10K into a major financial and news information provider datacenter in London many years back. From a sysadmin perspective, it was an interesting challenge. The bedding-in process was exhaustive, running bringup on domains at a high level for days to thoroughly test the hardware (some initially inexplicable problems were highlighted, and finally put down to bad CPU's), which was all very beneficial. I do like a system which gives you _ultimate_ control over the hardware - in the case of the E10K via a utility called redx - Red Cross - use it, and you may well need them ;-) which could allow you to actually fry bits of hardware. Great fun! I know/knew more about redx than any customer should... The author was Dan... or Tran... surname escapes me :-( If you buy one, type the undocumented command author into redx, and you will find out. On a management side, with the E10K there is a SSP - Service Support Processor, which for us was a U5 running a specialized version of Solaris 8, which through a private LAN can control the E10K hardware directly. You could play tunes by bringing up and down the speed of the fans :-) It was a great system (CRAY origin); but now its a dinosaur; and an expensive/unecologically-friendly one as everyone says. Buy a T2000, sort your storage carefully, install Solaris, and never look back... Regards... Sean. ___ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
