I guess the only hope is to find pin-compatible Xeons that are 64bit to replace what is a large chassis with 24 slots of disks that has specific motherboard form-factor, etc. We have 6 of these things from a government grant that must be used for the stated purpose. So, yes, we can buy product, but we simply can't get rid of the old equipment designed for this purpose. Again, government auditors for the research will say "pick the solution for the hardware has donated/purchased with grant funds" -- Welcome to the world of research. If Sun wants to _give_ us lots of hardware to make ZFS shine, great. But as is usually the case, I got to make do with what I have.
For the vast majority of the storage, I'm running them as iscsi targets with a single sun ultra20 as the frontend, but as from other messages in the list, the iscsi route along with NFS has its own pitfalls, 32bit or 64bit :) On 6/22/06, Erik Trimble <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
AMD Geodes are 32-bit only. I haven't heard any mention that they will _ever_ be 64-bit. But, honestly, this and the Via chip aren't really ever going to be targets for Solaris. That is, they simply aren't (any substantial) part of the audience we're trying to reach with Solaris x86. Also, relatively few 32-bit x86 systems can take > 4GB. While many of the late-model P4 (and all Xeons since the P3 Xeon) chips have the capability, most of them were married to chipsets which can't take more than 4GB. On the AMD side, I'm pretty sure only the Athlon MP-series was enabled for PAE, and only a tiny amount of them were sold. So, basically, the problem boils down to those with Xeons, a few single-socket P4s, and some of this-year's Pentium Ds. Granted, this makes up most of the x86 server market. So, yes, it _would_ be nice to be able to dump a tuning parameter into /etc/system to fix the cache starvation (and other related <4GB RAM) problems. However, I have to say that working with PAE is messy, and, honestly, 64-bit enabled 1U/3U servers are dirt cheap now. So, while I empathize with the market that has severe purchasing constraints, I think it's entirely reasonable to be up front about needing a 64-bit processor for ZFS, _if_ we've explored expanding the 32-bit environment, and discovered it was too expensive (in resources required) to fix. Dell (arrggh! Not THEM!) sells PowerEdge servers with plenty of PCI slots and RAM, and 64-bit CPUs for around $1000 now. Hell, WE sell dual-core x2100s for under $2k. I'm sure one can pick up a whitebox single-core Opteron for around $1k. That's not unreasonable to ask to get the latest technology. -Erik
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