David Tod Sigafoos wrote:
> A friend asked me recently about the need or Print and Index servers
> on Unidata. As I don't work with Unidata that much, or at least not
> to the infrastructure level, I thought I would pass this on to the
> knowledge trust here.
>
> They are running 'current' unidata on Sun OS box. They have around
> 600 users with fairly active entry and reporting going on. They have
> noticed a lot of different bog downs and we have been able to find
> some.
>
> SO .. their question is .. should they be using Index/Print servers.
> If so using Unix for these processes they shouldn't need 'state of the
> art' boxes .. Yes
1) I have little idea what you mean by Index/Print Servers. A print server
to me is a machine dedicated to despooling print requests. The benefits
your friend might get from having dedicated print servers will depend on
their network infrastructure, the type of printers they use, and how much
printing happens in their application. UniData itself is not going to spend
any time worrying about printing. All it does is hand print jobs off to
UNIX and let the OS handle them. If the UNIX spooler is spending
considerable time waiting for printers to come on line and is continually
retrying jobs then the OS will have less CPU cycles to devote to your
friend's 600 users, so offloading that overhead to a dedicated print server
could be beneficial.
As for Index servers, I have no idea. UniData does a pretty good job of
indexing if you let it, but you may mean something completely different so
I'll wait for a clarification before venturing any detailed comment.
2) 'current' UniData on Sun OS:
Give us a clue - Bleeding edge UniData is 7.1 (just released), reasonably
current is 6.x, 5.2 is getting a bit long in the tooth, and anything earlier
is way out of date. As for Sun, their OS hasn't been called SunOS for a
damn long time - its Solaris. The current release is 10, 9 is modern, 8
might still count as current. Solaris 2.5, 6, and 7 are probably
end-of-lifed already. SunOS was prior to that and no release of UniData
above 4.1 would run on it I'd expect.
600 users on a relatively old Sun box is a decent user population, you'd
expect that a number of years operating a decent sized application in that
environment without input from someone who knows UniData could end up with a
system that doesn't run as smoothly as it could.
So to come back to your question, I'd have to say I'd need a lot more info
to provide an opinion. Your friend might do well to engage someone who
knows what they are doing to have a look round their system for a couple of
days and do a performance analysis rather than focussing on one particular
idea.
Cheers,
Ken
---
u2-users mailing list
u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org
To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
