Lux, James P wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Landman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 12:54 PM
To: Robert G. Brown
Cc: David Mathog; beowulf@beowulf.org; Lux, James P
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Re: MS Cray
Robert G. Brown wrote:
The real question is why an admin-rich environment with
lots of full
time admins would ever buy into such a deal. If you've got a full
time admin ANYWAY, paying $150/month for support on top of this
(beyond the cost of the hardware is just insane.
Have you ever administered a lab full of these units? You
need as much help as you can get to administer the windows
machines. Sadly, while claims of there being more windows
admins are true (thats not the sad
part) you need (far) more to administer fewer windows
machines than the fewer admins needed for more Linux machines
(that is the sad part).
We have seen 2 full time admins handle 4000+ Linux machines
with time to develop software to make their lives easier
(Incyte), as compared to seeing 10 windows admins struggle to
keep 100 machines each up to date.
I think part of the problem in the Windows world is the incredible diversity of
applications (by which I include websites with significant client side
processing) that wind up being run on them. Rich growth medium, lots of
spontaneous mutations.
When you get to large desktop rollouts, Windows can have fairly low admin
overhead, but it's done by restricting flexibility (e.g. SMS, boot from the
network, etc.) to reduce the nutritional value of the growth medium. If
everyone boots the same image from the net, applying a patch to 10,000
computers is trivial. While such an environment would probably make everyone
on this list exceedingly unhappy (I could guarantee there's no compiler of any
kind in it..you might get a JRE, and edit your source code in MSWord), it would
(and does) serve a huge number of folks in the business world perfectly well.
Nonsense, in that line of thoughts, all that is required is to maintain
a "dev" desktop image to be served through the network. I do it with
linux with quite some ease, I see no reasons why this wouldn't be the
case under windows (meaning that once you're able to boot a network
image under windows, the mechanics of it should be trivially flexible
enough to point to differing images).
Windows in a development intensive, HPC environment, is going to be admin
expensive.
...thinking about all those admins that never wanted to learn Linux, the _will_
have to learn something new this time!
Eric
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