We are ready to dump Sun like a cooked-off hand grenade and have this grandure idea of moving to some of the AMD based Opteron 64-bit systems. Just curious if anyone is running this hardware yet? I noticed HP is already shipping these systems. The price tags on these system is just too good to be true. Based on a rough calculation, I can replace a $400k Sun Sparc III system with a pair of $30k AMD systems and get roughly the same system bandwidth. (I'm talking Oracle RAC here) Not too mention a significantly lower support cost and thus a much lower TCO in the long run. (well in the short run too for that matter) Also note that my administrative overhead costs will be much less for Linux as it is for Sun Sparc/Solaris.
We want to move our Oracle databases to the first supported release using the 2.6 kernel on the AMD Opteron 850 series procs. We also want to move our Weblogic servers to the same platform as well.
This is all in the next 18 months but I would love to here if anyone is trying this already.
Thx, rhugga
On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Chuck Carson wrote:
We are ready to dump Sun like a cooked-off hand grenade and have this grandure idea of moving to some of the AMD based Opteron 64-bit systems. Just curious if anyone is running this hardware yet? I noticed HP is already shipping these systems. The price tags on these system is just too good to be true. Based on a rough calculation, I can replace a $400k Sun Sparc III system with a pair of $30k AMD systems and get roughly the same system bandwidth. (I'm talking Oracle RAC here) Not too mention a significantly lower support cost and thus a much lower TCO in the long run. (well in the short run too for that matter) Also note that my administrative overhead costs will be much less for Linux as it is for Sun Sparc/Solaris.
We want to move our Oracle databases to the first supported release using the 2.6 kernel on the AMD Opteron 850 series procs. We also want to move our Weblogic servers to the same platform as well.
This is all in the next 18 months but I would love to here if anyone is trying this already.
I am running a HP zv5000z laptop that has an AMD64 3700+. It works great with Fedora Core 3 test 2.
I will be building a couple of AMD64 servers tomorrow.
Hello,
Have you considered looking at Sun's AMD offerings, they have a AMD line, the V20z and V40z, they are quite spiffy, they are basically Newisys boxes, they have licensed this technology. They have another design going on around the AMD chips called Galaxy which is still to appear. This will be a full Sun design. Don't quote me on this Galaxy bitty.
IBM has also got AMD64 offerings, HP has ditched the Itanic 2 and jumped in a hurry onto the AMD64 wagon. I believe that the EMT64 techology in the Intel chips are licensed from AMD ??? I think so. So you should be able to run Red Hat 64 or Fedora Core 64 bit on it.
The AMD64 chips should run your 32bit software without hassle. I think that you should be okay. But if it is over the next 18months I am sure that there will much more improvements on the AMD64 area. Sun should have their V80z out by then too. They are pushing the AMD64 platform quite hard.
Cheers,
Aly.
--- Aly Dharshi aly.dharshi@telus.net wrote:
Hello,
Have you considered looking at Sun's AMD offerings, they have a AMD line, the V20z and V40z, they are quite spiffy, they are basically Newisys boxes, they have licensed this technology. They have another design going on around the AMD chips called Galaxy which is still to appear. This will be a full Sun design. Don't quote me on this Galaxy bitty.
IBM has also got AMD64 offerings, HP has ditched the Itanic 2 and jumped in a hurry onto the AMD64 wagon. I believe that the EMT64 techology in the Intel chips are licensed from AMD ??? I think so. So you should be able to run Red Hat 64 or Fedora Core 64 bit on it.
The AMD64 chips should run your 32bit software without hassle. I think that you should be okay. But if it is over the next 18months I am sure that there will much more improvements on the AMD64 area. Sun should have their V80z out by then too. They are pushing the AMD64 platform quite hard.
Cheers,
I have been a die-hard Sun fan for almost 15 years and due to all my recent dificulties in dealing with them has made me decide to give other Vendors a chance. I don't wish it to be like this, dumping Sun at this point would be like an NFL veteran saying goodbye to football after a 15 year career. Just some of their recent policies and hard-nosed approach to various things have left us with a bad taste in our mouth. I am giving the servers you mentioned a glance, however, they don't offer anything a few other Vendors' servers don't and the price is nearly identical as well. Thus, it basically boils down to a support issue, which is where a lot of our recent difficulties with Sun stemmed from. We are already a large IBM shop, we have a 500-node Linux cluster, and to be honest I haven't been real impressed with their hardware or their support (the latter is more of an issue with IBM as well). We also have a SAN from IBM and have nothing but problems with it the 2 years we have had it. We have had 2 total downtimes lasting 13 days for the last one and if it didn't cost so damn much I would have set it out on the street for the garbage men.
At this point I am gonna give HP a shot, at least get a pair of the DL-585's to do my initial evaluation with. I may still stick with Solaris 9 x86 until a solid 2.6 based version of Fedora Core is supported, but I feel I need to test the waters elsewhere as far as hardware goes.
Thx for the info however. -rhugga
Hello,
I haven't found Sun's service too bad, but then I guess that we are a big corp with fancy support agreements ( I guess that in Canada we are ) and they have been pretty good. The V20z and V40z are machines that puts Sun on par with Dell, IBM and HP on the x86 line in a hurry. So the offerings will be similar. But the main thing as you said is the support.
Take a look a Dell, they have their new Dell 28xx series which has EMT64 should be able to run 64bit Linux. We have been testing Oracle 10g on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PE26xx series machines and its connect to a Hitachi SAN and its produced excellent results.
IBM has their Power5 line of machines which also run Linux, so you can check this out too. Their Power4's didn't perform as well in a similar configuration to Dell 26xx series machines from what I understand on Oracle tests.
Cheers,
Aly.
Rhugga wrote:
--- Aly Dharshi aly.dharshi@telus.net wrote:
Hello,
Have you considered looking at Sun's AMD offerings, they have a AMD line, the V20z and V40z, they are quite spiffy, they are basically Newisys boxes, they have licensed this technology. They have another design going on around the AMD chips called Galaxy which is still to appear. This will be a full Sun design. Don't quote me on this Galaxy bitty.
IBM has also got AMD64 offerings, HP has ditched the Itanic 2 and jumped in a hurry onto the AMD64 wagon. I believe that the EMT64 techology in the Intel chips are licensed from AMD ??? I think so. So you should be able to run Red Hat 64 or Fedora Core 64 bit on it.
The AMD64 chips should run your 32bit software without hassle. I think that you should be okay. But if it is over the next 18months I am sure that there will much more improvements on the AMD64 area. Sun should have their V80z out by then too. They are pushing the AMD64 platform quite hard.
Cheers,
I have been a die-hard Sun fan for almost 15 years and due to all my recent dificulties in dealing with them has made me decide to give other Vendors a chance. I don't wish it to be like this, dumping Sun at this point would be like an NFL veteran saying goodbye to football after a 15 year career. Just some of their recent policies and hard-nosed approach to various things have left us with a bad taste in our mouth. I am giving the servers you mentioned a glance, however, they don't offer anything a few other Vendors' servers don't and the price is nearly identical as well. Thus, it basically boils down to a support issue, which is where a lot of our recent difficulties with Sun stemmed from. We are already a large IBM shop, we have a 500-node Linux cluster, and to be honest I haven't been real impressed with their hardware or their support (the latter is more of an issue with IBM as well). We also have a SAN from IBM and have nothing but problems with it the 2 years we have had it. We have had 2 total downtimes lasting 13 days for the last one and if it didn't cost so damn much I would have set it out on the street for the garbage men.
At this point I am gonna give HP a shot, at least get a pair of the DL-585's to do my initial evaluation with. I may still stick with Solaris 9 x86 until a solid 2.6 based version of Fedora Core is supported, but I feel I need to test the waters elsewhere as far as hardware goes.
Thx for the info however. -rhugga
We have clustered dual opterons as welll as some single and dual cpu desktop/workstation machines... we like them. We don't as yeah have any running oracle although we do have 4-way xeon mp's doing that.
Opterons do have excellent scaling properties for most of our applications. For some things sparcs, and particulary ultrasparc IV will benchmark better due to their giant l2 cache (16MB)
With 8 way opterons starting to peek into the market and dual core opteron cpu's sometime in 05 the future looks pretty intereesting as well...
joelja
On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Chuck Carson wrote:
We are ready to dump Sun like a cooked-off hand grenade and have this grandure idea of moving to some of the AMD based Opteron 64-bit systems. Just curious if anyone is running this hardware yet? I noticed HP is already shipping these systems. The price tags on these system is just too good to be true. Based on a rough calculation, I can replace a $400k Sun Sparc III system with a pair of $30k AMD systems and get roughly the same system bandwidth. (I'm talking Oracle RAC here) Not too mention a significantly lower support cost and thus a much lower TCO in the long run. (well in the short run too for that matter) Also note that my administrative overhead costs will be much less for Linux as it is for Sun Sparc/Solaris.
We want to move our Oracle databases to the first supported release using the 2.6 kernel on the AMD Opteron 850 series procs. We also want to move our Weblogic servers to the same platform as well.
This is all in the next 18 months but I would love to here if anyone is trying this already.
Thx, rhugga
Joel Jaeggli wrote:
We have clustered dual opterons as welll as some single and dual cpu desktop/workstation machines... we like them. We don't as yeah have any running oracle although we do have 4-way xeon mp's doing that.
FWIW, I have a FC2 dual opteron workstation, and just in the last few days got Oracle 9i up and running on it. Not a production server, mind you, just my own sandbox.
I've found my workstation to be (subjectively) *very* fast. I find that WinXP inside a VMWare host is nice and responsive, as is Lotus Notes under wine (CrossOver Office). In a slightly more quantitative test, I can compile Postgres from a clean source tree in 1.5 minutes using "make -j 2", versus anywhere from 4.5 to 12 minutes on other machines that I have readily available (part of that is undoubtedly scsi vs ide drives).
Joe
Chuck Carson writes:
We are ready to dump Sun like a cooked-off hand grenade and have this grandure idea of moving to some of the AMD based Opteron 64-bit systems. Just curious if anyone is running this hardware yet?
FC 2 with the latest errata kernel is solid.
The only problem is Java. The only AMD64 JVM I know about is Blackdown's year-old 1.4.2-rc1 VM, and it's not stable.
Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Chuck Carson writes:
We are ready to dump Sun like a cooked-off hand grenade and have this grandure idea of moving to some of the AMD based Opteron 64-bit systems. Just curious if anyone is running this hardware yet?
FC 2 with the latest errata kernel is solid.
The only problem is Java. The only AMD64 JVM I know about is Blackdown's year-old 1.4.2-rc1 VM, and it's not stable.
I just downloaded Sun's 1.5 for AMD64 linux.
This would prolly be RC, I don't think that 1.5 is in GA.
Philip A. Chapman wrote:
Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Chuck Carson writes:
We are ready to dump Sun like a cooked-off hand grenade and have this grandure idea of moving to some of the AMD based Opteron 64-bit systems. Just curious if anyone is running this hardware yet?
FC 2 with the latest errata kernel is solid.
The only problem is Java. The only AMD64 JVM I know about is Blackdown's year-old 1.4.2-rc1 VM, and it's not stable.
I just downloaded Sun's 1.5 for AMD64 linux.
Philip A. Chapman writes:
Aly Dharshi wrote:
This would prolly be RC, I don't think that 1.5 is in GA.
You are correct.
Last time I checked Sun only offered a JVM for IA-64.
Sun bet the cookies on IA-64, and got caught with their pants down, when the Itanic hit the iceberg. I strongly suspect that they scrambled and repackaged the Blackdown build, as a short-term measure.
Investigating…
Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Philip A. Chapman writes:
Aly Dharshi wrote:
This would prolly be RC, I don't think that 1.5 is in GA.
You are correct.
Last time I checked Sun only offered a JVM for IA-64.
Sun bet the cookies on IA-64, and got caught with their pants down, when the Itanic hit the iceberg. I strongly suspect that they scrambled and repackaged the Blackdown build, as a short-term measure.
Investigating…
Sam,
Yesterday, you were correct. Today, you are not. :-) 1.5 has been released as production release Java 5. Go enjoy the Java goodness.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp
As an interesting aside, The AMD 64 bit version for Linux is ready and available, but the AMD 64 bit version for Windows is still a release candidate.
Enjoy,