On Thursday 12 November 2009 12:11:35 Bob Beck wrote: > i386/amd64. Nothing else is realistic these days. > > Sparc64 is wonderful but is basically legacy - it's great for finding > bugs and I use it for hacking but is not something I run in > production. > > All my production gear is i386 or amd64 - with a few exceptions. Yes, > the hardware sucks and the biosen were written by monkeys and have > their fingers in everything making the machine even more stupid. > There are no realistic alternatives. There might have been if Sun > hadn'tbeen so determined to turn itself from a good hardware company > into a company trying to compete in Microsoft's product space (selling > bad bloated software) where they had no hope of doing as well except > in crowds that would buy it because "at least it's not Microsoft".
I have to agree with Bob. The Sun-4/670 I used for a bbs ran for 5 years straight, interrupted only by power outages and disk failures, but they are in short supply these days, and use a ton of electricity. I daresay it eats the cost of a raid enabled i386 system each year, if not more. An i386 alternative to new hardware are the white Optilex systems from Dell. They range from 400 or 450MHz to about 933MHz, but you can do a lot at 933MHz. These are *well* built computers and I have several that are approaching 9 years of service, and one test system that is 11 years old. They are cheap, and I have extras. At about 210W they aren't too bad in food department. Next to me at the moment are two Optiplex GX2?0 machines which seem to be pretty solid as well, but they don't yet have the flight time that the white Optiplexi do. For modern stuff there are scads of systems out there. For me, the power supply is the first thing I look at. If it goes ferral--and I've seen that--they can destroy everthing. Antec rules. --STeve Andre'
