20020328: Re: Proposed equipment Linda Miller <address@hidden>, Mike Schmidt <address@hidden>, Tom Yoksas <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden

Mohan,

Sorry for the delay getting back to you on this.  We've had pretty good
luck in the past with Sun giving huge discounts over and above the standard
university discount.  In the end, our final cost is usually somewhere
around 25-30% of original list price.  As Ben mentioned, we're targeting a
SunFire V880 as an upgrade to the current Sun E420 (motherlode) and hope
the cost will be around $40K for a $215K (list) system -- with trade-in.

On ther other hand, we're currently moving our main data relay machine to
an Intel system that cost about $3800 (redundant power, 2 x 1GHz CPU, 4GB
memory, 2 x 36GB 10K rpm drives, software RAID 1, gigabit ethernet) with
an emphasis on lots of memory to memory map a large LDM product queue
and as much hardware redundancy as possible.  One advantage to this
configuration is that this system has a small power and heat load in the
main computer room.  It will be able to stay up during the semi-annual
maintenance power-down's whereas the big servers, clusters, and RAID farms
will have to be shutdown.

In general, we've had excellent luck with Intel systems over the years
except for cooling issues.  As Ben mentioned, we've had a bit of a problem
with hardware on new relay system, but the main issue is finger pointing
between two hardware manufacturers.  We're mostly past that now and my
only hesitation about using Intel systems is for use in remote locations
where they're not readily accessible -- which may not apply in this case.

mike

On Mar 28, 11:29am, Mohan Ramamurthy wrote:
> Subject: Re: Proposed equipment
> Ben and Mke,
>
> Many thanks for sharing your proposed equipment and upgrade items/costs
> with us.  This gives us a pretty good idea on the horse-power to shoot for
> and the size and cost of disk arrays. Boy, those Sun machines are expensive
> - compared to comparable Linux systems!
>
> Mohan


>Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 11:18:42 -0700
>From: Ben Domenico <address@hidden>
>To: Mike Schmidt <address@hidden>,
>   Mohan Ramamurthy <address@hidden>
>cc: Anne Wilson <address@hidden>,
>   Linda Miller <address@hidden>,
>   Tom Yoksas <address@hidden>, address@hidden,
>   address@hidden
>Subject: Re: Proposed equipment

Mohan,

Mike brings up another important issue to consider, that is, having the IDD 
relay processes running on a different machine from the one running the 
comput-intensive decoders, services, etc.  I should have mentioned that 
earlier.

-- Ben

>Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 15:44:29 -0600
>To: "Mike Schmidt" <address@hidden>
>From: Mohan Ramamurthy <address@hidden>
>Subject: Re: Proposed equipment
>Cc: Ben Domenico <address@hidden>,
>   Mohan Ramamurthy <address@hidden>,
>   Anne Wilson <address@hidden>,
>   Linda Miller <address@hidden>,
>   Mike Schmidt <address@hidden>,
>   Tom Yoksas <address@hidden>, address@hidden,
>   address@hidden

Mike,

Thank you so much for the information on your systems.  With the kind of 
additional discount you mention, I guess the Sun option is indeed 
attractive.  I tried to look at comparable Dell servers and they are also 
very pricey.  But I don't know if we would have the same leverage with Sun 
that you folks do.

Your point about separating the compute box from the data ingest box is 
well taken.  Our experience has been similar, although not with these kinds 
of very high end systems.

Mohan